Freedom.
It's America's signature trait. Many of our most cherished liberties are enshrined in the Bill of Rights.
The right to practice one's preferred faith. The right to a jury trial. The right against self-incrimination.
And perhaps the most vociferously defended of our freedoms: the right to bear and keep arms.
Yet, not all our freedoms are enumerated in the Bill of Rights. For one, Americans (in accordance with local noise ordinances) enjoy the right to listen to music inside our vehicles.
Sometimes in the course of human events, the confluence of freedoms comes to a tragic and deadly head. As it did last month outside a Jacksonville gas station.
On Nov. 23, after attending his son's wedding, Michael David Dunn pulled into a gas station. He parked beside a SUV. Inside the vehicle, a quartet of young men were jamming to tunes. Music that was too loud for Dunn's liking.
As his girlfriend shopped inside, he confronted them about the volume. Dunn and back-seat passenger 17-year-old Jordan Davis allegedly exchanged words.
Rather than park elsewhere, or call the cops to intervene — the sane, civilized thing to do — Dunn settled the matter with bullets.
Eight or nine times the Satellite Beach gun collector fired into the SUV. When the gun smoke cleared, Jordan — who was struck twice — never would get the chance to suit up the next week as planned for his first job at McDonald's.
Jordan and his friends were free to listen to music. And Dunn was free to bear arms.
But in what warped reality does the overlap of two freedoms make it acceptable to adjust another's music volume by gunfire?
As Jacksonville Sheriff's Lt. Rob Schoonover put it: the music "was loud, they admitted that, but that's not a reason for someone to open fire on them and take action."
That this even need to be said is unnerving.
Yet, here we are. Police later arrested Dunn on murder and attempted murder charges. He claimed he saw a shotgun inching out a rear window of the red SUV, and fearing his life, simply got the drop on the SUV crew. Only police never found the mystery firearm.
In the days since Lucia McBath and Ron Davis buried their son, the case predictably has drawn comparisons to the February shooting of another unarmed teenager, Trayvon Martin. Both dead boys were black.
But the shootings have significant differences: in the Dunn case, there was no scuffle, and he was quickly arrested.
But as in the Martin case, Dunn's lawyer has hinted of trotting out as a defense Florida's "stand your ground" law — which blesses the use of deadly force if the shooter perceives imminent danger to his life.
And likewise, another unarmed young man, after engaging with an armed citizen in a public place, won't see his 18th birthday.
It's the reckless loss of life — regardless of where you stand on guns — that should bend our moral divining rod toward reasonable change.
Indeed, the central issue at hand is less about the almost pathological clinging to our guns than our truly pathological clinging to unsound laws that govern guns. Laws such as "stand your ground" that some see (even if incorrectly) as bulletproof permission to shoot first and ask questions later.
Society has a life-or-death decision to make. An especially important decision for Floridians, who have the peril of living in a state that's a proving ground for NRA-backed gun laws. Do we continue to tolerate imperfect gun laws that continue to produce the imperfect result of lives cut short, or do we demand tweaks — or going back to the drawing board, if necessary — in order to balance freedom with common sense?
NRA or not, Floridians have the power to make that perfectly clear choice.
deowens@tribune.com or 407-420-5095
