A Florida man who was convicted of murder for fatally shooting a teenager after an argument over loud music outside a convenience store was sentenced recently to life in prison without parole. Under the laws of that state — indeed, any state — it was a just sentence.

Michael Dunn, 47, fired 10 times into an SUV carrying four black teenagers in November 2012. He killed 17-year-old Jordan Davis of Marietta, Ga.

His conviction and sentence have broader meaning for a society that has, frankly, gone gun crazy. It sends a clear message that the absurd notion that people have a right to shoot to kill whenever they feel threatened — or sometimes just bothered — won’t prevail in court, despite bad laws that embolden shooters by giving them wider latitude to use lethal force.

Dunn, who is white, claimed that he acted in self-defense, even though he fired repeatedly into the SUV as it fled the scene. By all available evidence, Davis was unarmed, didn’t leave the vehicle and never threatened Dunn.

Prosecutors portrayed Dunn as a cold-blooded killer, but his past does not suggest that he was a monster. A software developer, Dunn had just left his son’s wedding a happy man.

Instead of a cold-blooded killer, Dunn was a guy with a gun who snapped. That’s even more frightening. If he had not had a gun, Jordan would be alive — never mind the mindless mantra of the gun crowd that “guns don’t kill, people do.”

The targets of Dunn’s ire were African-American teenagers playing music he didn’t like; that contributed to his irrational, even insane, rage. But such a breakdown can occur without racial animus. Either way, the tragic outcome was indefensible.

The Dunn verdict and sentence show that courts will not allow misguided laws to become licenses to kill. Still, encouraging similar tragedies is not what any state should seek.

Editorial by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

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