I won't speak for kleinbl00, but for me my goal in starting this thread was to reach out to people like you who don't know a lot. More info is good for everyone, and I'd like the debate over gun control to come from a place of facts rather than hysterics.

As an aside, I'll say that I disagree with his characterization of the felony murder rule as bullshit.

Self-defense is a big legal issue, and has he says it's complicated. It's also handled at the state level rather than the federal. Some states have a duty to retreat, for example, meaning that you have to try to get away from an attacker before you use force (deadly or otherwise) to defend yourself. Others don't. Some states also grant you a presumption of self-defense if you use deadly force on someone who broke into your house.

The typical standard is that you must have a reasonable fear of death or serious bodily injury for you to be justified in using lethal (or potentially lethal) force on someone else. So someone talks shit and you shoot them, probably not self-defense. Someone comes at you with a bat, I think you probably could (since a bat can kill you), but again this will depend on the situation. It'll also depend on your locale and what juries tend to be like. I live in a place that has a history of lots of crime (we were like 1st in the country for murder back in the last '90s), so even now people tend to be very pro-self-defense. This in turn means prosecutors are less likely to prosecute someone who might make a self-defense argument, since they don't think they can get a conviction. This is anecdotal, but based on a couple prosecutors who came and spoke to one of my law school classes ~2007.

The end result is that it's difficult to make blanket statements, and as in the case of Trayvon Martin, it all gets very political very quickly.