An article on bearingarms.com has a title that is uncontroversial and would seem to belabor the obvious: Stand Your Ground laws are not a license to kill and don’t make murder legal. Yet, several organizations and people within what is loosely referred to as the ‘gun control movement’ or gun control lobby have willfully mischaracterized ‘stand your ground’ (SYG) legislation as legitimizing murder, justifying a ‘shoot first’ response to perceived criminal activity, and eliminating restraints on killing people. Read the entire article.
The article begins: “Another day, another brazen lie” is the gun control movement’s strategy as the writers here have documented numerous times before. One of the lies that’s continuously repeated by Gun Grab Lobby is that Stand Your Ground (SYG) laws allow people to “shoot first” with careless abandon. The paid, professional liars at Everytown did this just yesterday.” February 22, 2022.
Everytown goes so far as to craft a new category of shooting: Shoot First laws. This phrase is not found in state statutes on the use of force, including deadly force. The Everytown statement asserts: “Shoot First laws—commonly known as Stand Your Ground laws—essentially make murder legal. “Stand Your Ground” is an intentional choice by the gun lobby to misrepresent what these laws really are. pic.twitter.com/tRebQTg8F9.
Ranjit Singh, the article’s author, provides the text of Florida’s Stand Your Ground Law, which Singh assesses as a standard representation of this type of legislation. Reading sections of the law is illuminating. The justified use of deadly force is included here.
776.012 Use or threatened use of force in defense of person.—
(2) A person is justified in using or threatening to use deadly force if he or she reasonably believes that using or threatening to use such force is necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the imminent commission of a forcible felony. A person who uses or threatens to use deadly force in accordance with this subsection does not have a duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground if the person using or threatening to use the deadly force is not engaged in a criminal activity and is in a place where he or she has a right to be.
The text of the law makes it clear that the use of defensive force is lawful only if a person reasonably believes that such force is necessary. The word “reasonable” is key; when someone uses force unreasonably, they get convicted for it. The law does not say anything about shooting another person first as Everytown falsely claims. The law does not create a license to kill. The law does not make murder legal. Anyone with a brain more advanced than a Pet Rock distills these insights by reading the statute. The tendentious ideologues at Everytown know this. They write these declarations anyway. Truth is not valued by Everytown’s culture.
Everytown’s false assertions go beyond the misrepresentations seen above. Everytown’s statement continues: “Unlike traditional self-defense laws in all 50 states, Shoot First laws make it legal for anyone to shoot and kill another person in a situation, even where they know they could have safely walked away. — Everytown (@Everytown) February 22, 2022. This statement incorporates a clever conflating of distinct lines of jurisprudence: the permissible use of deadly force and the concept of the duty to retreat before the use of deadly force is legally justified. The conflating of these concepts is profoundly dishonest and misleading. Many, if not most, states incorporate what is denominated as “the Castle Doctrine,” meaning one’s home is one’s castle and, consequently, no duty to retreat is imposed before deadly force can be justifiably exercised.
Singh concludes: “Everytown’s lying serves two purposes here: first, to attack our right to bear arms in self-defense (their corporate mission), and second, to support criminals in the commission of crime. Everytown’s unreasonable demand that victims walk away when faced with what a reasonable person would understand to be “imminent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the imminent commission of a forcible felony” shows who they really side with.”
Michael Sabbeth is the author of The Honorable Hunter: How To Honorably & Persuasively Defend & Promote Hunting. Please see: https://thehonorablehunter.com/index.php/books
