Sunday, August 25, 2013

Realize the Dream speaker says “racist” Stand Your Ground laws “work to kill our young people”

Sofia Campos United We DreamJust a month after the acquittal of George Zimmerman, the man who shot and killed black teenager Trayvon Martin, gun control activists continue to wage a war on Stand Your Ground laws in the United States — but perhaps none have condemned them so harshly as Sofia Campos, who on Saturday said the “racist” laws “work to kill our young people.”
Campos, who heads up the United We Dream network of youth-led immigrant organizations, spoke on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial this weekend at the Realize the Dream March and Rally, part of the 50th anniversary March on Washington. As an undocumented immigrant, Campos spoke out against “racist” policies, including Stand Your Ground.
“Racist policies like Secure Communities, which works to break apart families, and just as much as racist policies like Stand Your Ground in Florida work to kill our young people today, the prison industrial complex and the detention center industrial complex are one and the same,” she told the crowd on the National Mall.
But Campos clearly doesn’t know that in Florida, Stand Your Ground laws have actually been helping African-Americans. Blacks in the state have made about one third of the Stand Your Ground claims — almost double the 16.6 percent of Florida’s population that is black — and a majority of those claims are successful, as The Daily Caller reported. The success rate for African-Americans is also higher than that of whites.
So as “fierce” as Campos believed her rhetoric to be on Saturday, the facts simply don’t back up her claim.
Watch her speech below:

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