This Person is a Member of the US House of Representatives

[Lemur]

I don't think this would be a national case if it weren't for the racial angle.

Not surprisingly, I have a different take. I think it's more like a crossover hit—if you don't mind me being flippant, Prince got started with a black audience, but his music was catchy enough to crossover into the mainstream. The Martin case has a racial angle, yes, and for some people that's the main show. However, the case is sufficiently disturbing to interest the broader population. So yes and no. Some people are primarily interested in the racial angle. I would suggest that many people who are following it (myself included) are concerned about the use of force and the puzzling behavior of the local authorities. Like Seamus said, there's a dearth of good information, and the whole thing should be filed under wait-and-see. What Seamus failed to mention, on the other hand, was that if the local prosecutors had their way, there would be no trial and no investigation. This is the aspect that creeps me out. Zimmerman, like any American, should have his day in court. The attempt to short-circuit that process is the aspect that does not pass the smell test.

You're watching to much msnbc

You know full well I don't watch any cable news, but you make an excellent point, and I was wrong. Yes, it appears that Florida's passage of Stand Your Ground in 2005 was ALEC's model, not the other way around. I regret the error.

Florida was ground zero for the NRA’s quest to enhance the Castle Doctrine. As a large and diverse swing state, it carries symbolic weight as a barometer of public opinion. But it is also a state where the gun-rights lobby is a formidable force. Gun-control activists trace this potency to Marion Hammer, a tiny, gray-haired septuagenarian who has been at the forefront of the gun-rights movement for decades. The NRA’s former president — the first female head in the organization’s history — Hammer is now a lobbyist based in Tallahassee. Gun-control proponents say she kick-started Stand Your Ground’s journey through the legislature and wielded her clout to pressure skittish lawmakers into backing the bill. “Her sway in the Florida legislature has been instrumental for the NRA,” says Brian Malte, director of legislation at the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. “It’s why the NRA has used Florida as its laboratory.” (Hammer did not respond to an interview request from TIME.)

As planned, the law spread from there. In the seven years since Stand Your Ground became law in Florida, a wave of similar measures have swept across the U.S. According to the Legal Community Against Violence, 24 states in addition to Florida now have Stand Your Ground (or, in the gun-control lobby’s parlance, “Shoot First” or “Make My Day”) laws. In some of those states, gun-owners still have a duty to “retreat” — to avoid violent confrontation if possible — outside their homes. But in some states, like Florida, the law contains no such provision. “Florida was their testing ground,” says Malte, “and what the NRA has done is they’ve tried to nationalize Florida’s law.”

To expand the doctrine of Stand Your Ground, the NRA harnessed its connections with an organization called the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which promotes conservative public policy by affecting change in state legislatures. One of the ways ALEC does this is to draft model legislation that its members can push in their home states. According to gun-control proponents, ALEC used Florida’s Stand Your Ground law as a template in its push to broaden the Castle Doctrine nationwide.