There’s been a lot of talk about Florida’s Stand Your Ground (SYG) Law since the death of Trayvon Martin. So I decided to take a look at this law (which approximately 20 other states have adopted). Welcome to the age of vigilantism.
Here’s what outsiders might fail to realize: In Florida, the shooter only has to say these magic words to basically get a Get Out of Jail Free card: “I feared for my life…I felt I was in imminent danger, so I shot in self-defense.”
This is what the Florida Legislature has wrought with the so-called Stand Your Ground Law, enacted last decade.
The law allows gun owners to shoot (and kill) in self-defense if they feel threatened. Before Stand Your Ground, gun owners had to retreat in such situations, unless they were in their homes. There was a high legal threshold to cross before shots could be fired justifiably on streets, sidewalks or in other public settings.
Pretty amazing. I’m sure it’s made everyone safer and hasn’t been abused. Oh, wait…
“Gangsters are using this law to have gunfights,” he said. “That’s exactly what this law breeds.”
In 2008, two gangs in Tallahassee got into a shoot-out. A 15-year-old boy was killed. A judge dismissed charges against the shooters, citing “stand your ground.”
“Before this law, we would have had a duty to avoid that,” Meggs said. “I should not meet you in the street for a gunfight.”
How can this happen? Answer: It’s the law. And it appears nobody is keeping an official body count in Florida except Arthur Hayhoe, executive director of the Florida Coalition to Stop Gun Violence:
No other group keeps tabs — not the Florida Prosecuting Attorneys Association, not the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. That’s problematic, because even academic studies of the effects of the law rely on anecdotes.
And Hayhoe admits his count is incomplete. The Times searched Florida newspapers and “found at least 93 cases in the past five years in which the new law was a factor. Those are just the confrontations that made the papers.”
What is known: Reports of justifiable homicides in Florida have spiked.
For the first half of this decade, the state counted an average of 34 justifiable homicides a year, as few as 31 and as many as 43.
[…]
2009: 105.
The first six months of 2010: 44.
“I have always predicted that they would increase as more and more gun owners learn what they can do with this law,” Hayhoe said.
And what did law enforcement (ya know, the professionals) think of the law:
Drowned out in the debate were the critical voices of law enforcement officials and prosecutors. They worried people would become less sensitive to gun violence and death. They envisioned vigilantism.
[…]
Miami’s police chief made a prediction shortly before the law took effect:
“Whether it’s trick-or-treaters or kids playing in the yard of someone who doesn’t want them there or some drunk guy stumbling into the wrong house,” Chief John Timoney told the New York Times, “you’re encouraging people to possibly use deadly physical force where it shouldn’t be used.”
And these situations are happening.
Four years later, Billy Kuch got drunk, so drunk that at 5 a.m. one day he stumbled to the door of the wrong house in a look-alike neighborhood and tried to open it, twice.
Before the “stand your ground” law, homeowner Gregory Stewart would have been expected to hunker down in his Land O’Lakes residence, dead-bolt secure, and call police.
With the law in place, he could use deadly force anywhere he had a right to be, provided he felt threatened with death or great bodily harm. He had no duty to retreat from danger.
Stewart left his wife inside with their baby and stepped outside, gun in hand.
Kuch put his hands up and asked for a light.
“Please don’t make me shoot you,” Stewart said.
Kuch, then 23, says he might have stumbled. Stewart, then 32, told police the unarmed man took three steps forward.
The bullet ripped into Kuch’s chest, nicked his heart, shot through his liver, in and out of his stomach, through his spleen, then out his back. He felt like his body was on fire.
Stewart, when questioned by deputies, began to cry. “I could have given him a light,” he said.
Shoot first, ask questions later. There are a lot more of these stories. But here’s the money quote:
In many instances where deadly force is used, there are two witnesses and one of them is dead. That leaves one version of events, from a person motivated by self-interest.
That sounds familiar.