The justification behind the "stand your ground" laws seems to be the theory that you are entitled to use lethal force without legal consequence if you are in fear of your life, with an "imminent" thrown in there somewhere. There's a lot of logic chopping that can be done in figuring out just how that works and how much room to maneuver you have.
How does that extend to protecting another person for example? Does it make a difference if it is a family member you are protecting? A friend? A total stranger? What if it's not a direct threat to you, but to your property - which could lead to fear of your life through some circumstance? Could you shoot someone throwing a molotov cocktail at your house? What if it's just a can of beer - or an egg? If it's dark and you don't know exactly what the projectile is, are you justified in shooting back? And so on.
Now I'm not going to pursue this - I'm just putting these points out to focus on what seems to be the giant loophole in this law. It doesn't matter whether or not the threat is real - the principle seems to be that you are in fear of your life, and just how much you believe it.
More below the Orange Omnilepticon.
The problem with the Stand Your Ground laws is that they essentially amount to putting a person's emotional state of mind on trial. That is the $64,000 question. How exactly does one go about proving - after the fact - that one's fears clear the legal hurdle by a sufficient height to justify using deadly force?
Fear is a powerful tool for political organizing. It's easy to make people afraid all the time, easy to paint the world as full of threats. It's a classic means to propel a political agenda. And it's not wrong to do so when the threats are legitimate.
But it's also one of the chief tools of demagogues, the kind of thing that leads to really bad behavior by society. Fear makes people stupid. Fear makes people doubt. Fear brings out the worst in everyone - and in countries as well.
The United States is a country that reserves the right to attack any other country it perceives as a threat. The United States is a country that is willing to accept civilian casualties from drone strikes while pursuing the war on terror, out of fear. The United States is a country that throws people in prison without legal charge or process, and subjects them to torture. The United States is a country that spies on everyone, its own citizens, its allies, and its enemies alike. The United States is increasingly a country where the first amendment is a threat to the established order.
And fear is the reason. Our leaders have chosen to deal with our fears by putting them in the driver's seat. We have abandoned confidence in our laws and our institutions. We have lost the ability to trust. We have embraced unspeakable cruelties and casual atrocities under the most dubious of justifications. We slash our investment in society, in ourselves out of vague fears of some terrible economic calamity lurking somewhere down the road. At the same time we invest heavily in military force, to the point where it becomes the hammer we want to use on all our problems.
But if it's a problem not susceptible to a hammer, we've convinced ourselves we're powerless. And that makes us even more fearful. It's a feedback loop.
The people who've embraced the Stand Your Ground laws and all the rest of that agenda are people whose lives are driven by fear. They can claim all the noble purpose and higher principles they like; it's still fear in the driver's seat. But not just fear alone. It's also about inspiring fear in others. It's about making your enemies (whomever you wish to target) too afraid to challenge you. It's about always getting your way - because others are afraid to get on your bad side, and because you don't trust them enough to deal with them any other way. It goes hand in hand with going through life as the biggest, baddest bully. When your life is built around fear, it's the logic that safety and power comes from making others fear you more than you fear them.
The late science fiction writer H. Beam Piper wrote a novellette in 1958 with John Joseph McGuire that was published under the name Lone Star Planet. (Available for download at the link thanks to Project Gutenberg.) It was set on a planet settled largely from Texas, and a key element in its government was the political equivalent of a stand your ground law: From Chapter 10
"As I understand it, the laws of New Texas do not extend their ordinary protection to persons engaged in the practice of politics. An act of personal injury against a politician is considered criminal only to the extent that the politician injured has not, by his public acts, deserved the degree of severity with which he has been injured, and the Court of Political Justice is established for the purpose of determining whether or not there has been such an excess of severity in the treatment meted out by the accused to the injured or deceased politician. This gives rise, of course, to some interesting practices; for instance, what is at law a trial of the accused is, in substance, a trial of his victim. But in any case tried in this court, the accused must be a person who has injured or killed a man who is definable as a practicing politician under the government of New Texas."
What this meant, in practical terms, was that it was open season on politicians who tried to accomplish anything but the barest minimum of governance. Think of it as libertarianism on steroids, especially since nearly everyone on the planet was armed as a matter of custom and habit. And if this sounds like a wet dream for gun nuts, southern nationalists, and paranoids in general, well that's just about right.
It's interesting to consider this story now while David Harris-Gershon has a diary on the rec list TX Police Force Women to Throw Out Tampons to Enter Senate Gallery, While Allowing Concealed Guns. It occurs to me they could be making a mistake.
The Republicans in the Texas Legislature and the Governor's Mansion are in the process of forcing through a truly heinous package of festering nutbaggery. One direct consequence of their action will be an increase in the death rate for women who will lose access to medical care - and for their children as well. It will give the Texas State Government incredibly intrusive powers over the most personal decisions men and women can make.
You kind of have to wonder if H. Beam Piper would have an opinion on whether or not the politicians of Texas today ought to be subject to the same kind of citizen's right of armed self defense against government overreach enjoyed by the inhabitants of New Texas. I suspect the inmates currently in charge of the asylum in Austin would fail to appreciate the irony.
At the national level, Joan McCarter comments on the latest idiocy in which Republicans are once more attempting to ensure that millions of Americans will have NO access to decent health care; thousands will die every year for lack of the kind of healthcare the rest of the civilized world takes for granted.
It seems to me that if the mere fact that fear of death is considered sufficient justification to employ deadly force, there are an awful lot of people in American today who could conceivably fall within the reach of the "Stand Your Ground" principle. (Notwithstanding the problem that critically ill people are not in the best shape to exercise their second amendment rights - can family or friends step up on their behalf?) It's not an unreasoning fear either; people die every day for lack of timely medical care - and charges can be brought if it's the result of negligence. How much more so could the use of deadly force be justified in the face of a deliberate, organized effort to deny people medical care? Or all of the other assaults on the common good for that matter? The logic of fear is relentless.
The "only thing we have to fear is fear itself." It is a failure of our times that those words have come to seem less an expression of confidence, than a warning or even an admission of failure. Back in 2008 another president started his first term with Hope as a theme. If that seems like another time, it's because the merchants of fear have done their best to eradicate it.
Our challenge is to find a way to stand OUR ground without giving in to fear. Because make no mistake: we DO have reason to fear.