“Self-defense is now used more widely than it was under the old law in the State of Florida,” said William Eddins, the state attorney in Pensacola and the president of the Florida Prosecuting Attorneys Association. “It is a very broad law in terms of the availability of the defendant to try to take advantage of this law. It has created more litigation for the state in cases involving violence and in murder cases, in particular.”

The state attorney in Tallahassee, Willie Meggs, who fought the (Stand your Ground) law when it was proposed, said: “The consequences of the law have been devastating around the state. It’s almost insane what we are having to deal with.”

It is increasingly used by gang members fighting gang members, drug dealers battling drug dealers and people involved in road rage encounters. Confrontations at a bar are also common: Someone looks at someone the wrong way or bothers someone’s girlfriend. The cases are sometimes successfully argued, and sometimes not.

…Dan Gross, the president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, says that his organization tracks laws in 21 states that extend the self-defense doctrine beyond the home. The usual label for such laws — “stand your ground” — is politically charged, he said, suggesting that a more apt label would be “Shoot first, ask questions later.”

Laws like the one in Florida allow situations like the Trayvon Martin killing, he said. “We’re heartbroken, but we’re not surprised.”

Combining broader boundaries of self-protection while weakening gun-control laws and promoting the “paranoid mentality” that people need guns for self-protection is “a mentality that leads to tragedy,” he said.

A gunman had pulled up on an expensive motorbike with a big engine, dismounted and pulled out two high-calibre handguns. He fired at “everything in front of him, children and adults,” the state prosecutor said.

He shot dead Jonathan Sandler, a 30-year-old French-Israeli rabbi who had recently joined the staff to teach Yiddish, and Sandler’s two sons, aged six and three. Then he stepped over the bodies and chased children into the school courtyard where witnesses said he pursued a child, the 10-year-old daughter of the principal, grabbed her by the hair, pulled her to him and shot her at close range.

“My sons saw the bodies, there was blood everywhere,” said Guedj as she stood crying, face contorted in horror, outside the school. “My son was saying, ‘We were praying, Mum, but our prayers didn’t work’. “

France is in a state of shock and revulsion after the rabbi and three children were killed in the most brutal attack on the French Jewish community in decades, which also left another 17-year-old boy fighting for his life in hospital.

The mood, described as “blind panic” by one witness to the shootings, is heightened by a fear that France has been struck by a serial killer on the loose who is targeting minorities.

One of the biggest manhunts in modern French history is under way after prosecutors confirmed that the gunman, who sped off on the motorbike, used the same stolen bike and same powerful high calibre handgun as was used in two “ride-by” motorbike shootings last week which targeted soldiers of north African and black Caribbean origin.

Three soldiers were killed, including two Muslims, and another is in a critical condition after the gunman opened fire on a soldier in Toulouse eight days ago and then targeted three paratroopers at a cashpoint in the nearby town of Montaubun on Thursday.

“Everything leads one to believe that these were racist and antisemitic acts,” said the mayor of Toulouse, Pierre Cohen.

Turning the tables on an advocacy group that has long supported victims of pedophile priests, lawyers for the Roman Catholic Church and priests accused of sexual abuse in two Missouri cases have gone to court to compel the group to disclose more than two decades of e-mails that could include correspondence with victims, lawyers, whistle-blowers, witnesses, the police, prosecutors and journalists.

The group, the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests, known as SNAP, is neither a plaintiff nor a defendant in the litigation. But the group has been subpoenaed five times in recent months in Kansas City and St. Louis, and its national director, David Clohessy, was questioned by a battery of lawyers for more than six hours this year. A judge in Kansas City ruled that the network must comply because it “almost certainly” had information relevant to the case.

The network and its allies say the legal action is part of a campaign by the church to cripple an organization that has been the most visible defender of victims, and a relentless adversary, for more than two decades. “If there is one group that the higher-ups, the bishops, would like to see silenced,” said Marci A. Hamilton, a law professor at Yeshiva University and an advocate for victims of clergy sex crimes, “it definitely would be SNAP. And that’s what they’re going after. They’re trying to find a way to silence SNAP.”

Lawyers for the church and priests say they cannot comment because of a judge’s order. But William Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, a church advocacy group in New York, said targeting the network was justified because “SNAP is a menace to the Catholic Church.”

Mr. Donohue said leading bishops he knew had resolved to fight back more aggressively against the group: “The bishops have come together collectively. I can’t give you the names, but there’s a growing consensus on the part of the bishops that they had better toughen up and go out and buy some good lawyers to get tough. We don’t need altar boys.”