The controversy surrounding the Trayvon Martin tragedy has been rehashed over and over, but I want to address an angle that I haven't seen before. As I've read the coverage, I've been wondering when the right to own a gun merged into the right to kill. The essence of the stand your ground law, which is that a person, when they reasonably believe they are or are about to be the victim of deadly force, does not have to retreat before using deadly force himself. If you believe George Zimmerman's account of the tragedy, that's exactly what he did. He was attacked and, regardless of whether he was able to safely defuse or extract himself from the situation, he was justified in killing Martin.
Another name that has popped up in the press lately is that of Marion Hammer, the force behind Florida's stand your ground law. Hammer is an important NRA lobbyist whose message is more persuasive to some because she is 71 and stands 4'11". A lifelong gun owner and NRA member, Hammer's self-righteousness was magnified based on her own harrowing experience. According to her depiction, she was followed by a car full of young men who appeared to be under the influence and who made threatening remarks and gestures toward her. She pulled out her loaded handgun and pointed it at the car, scaring the men away. I assume this story is true, and if so, it sounds like her gun saved her from a horrible fate.
However, that situation does not adequately justify the stand your ground law. Clearly I wasn't there, but because the men were younger than her and in a car, it sounds like trying to escape would be futile. If escape was futile and the men had, in fact, attacked her, she would have been protected by standard self-defense laws and would not have needed a stand your ground law. Stand your ground comes into play in two alternate scenarios. First, say she had opened fire instead of just brandishing the gun at the car. She may have unnecessarily killed one or more people and would have been protected under stand your ground. Second, say the men had been on foot and she had been in her car or able to get into it before they reached her. Even though she was in the position to safely escape the situation, she would not be required to under stand your ground. She could open fire on the men and not face criminal liability.
To allow this outcome is to completely bypass the criminal justice system. Battery is not a capital crime, much less threatening someone, but the stand your ground sanctions a penalty of great bodily harm and possibly death for the infractions. Second, even if such offenses were capital crimes and society had determined that committing them made someone deserving of death, the stand your ground law sanctions the imposition of that penalty without any due process. Instead of a prosecutor, defense attorney, judge and jury making the decision to impose the penalty, we have a citizen acting on his or her own volition.
Certainly this evil is outweighed by the tragedy of an innocent person suffering great bodily harm or death if those are the only two choices, which is the case if the potential victim has no chance to escape the attacker. But when there are three choices: suffering the attack, escaping or defusing the situation, or taking the law into one's own hands, the second alternative is by far the best outcome. In response to the argument that the stand your ground law prevents the potential attacker from striking someone else, I respond that such an argument flies in the face of the foundations of our criminal justice system and due process. The penalty is too harsh, the decision maker is not reliable, and society has decided that it is not just to punish someone for a crime that they may but have not committed.
Which brings me back to the shift in the NRA's platform. Instead of championing the right to own a weapon, the NRA advocates the right to use that weapon as a first resort, not a last. When the outcome is something as final and irreversible as death, that is unacceptable.
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