Stand Your Ground Makes No Sense

[flamin lib]

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/04/opinion/stand-your-ground-makes-no-sense.html

A result (of stand your ground laws), according to the Association of Prosecuting Attorneys, is hamstrung investigations and legal protections greater than those afforded to police officers. Not only have these laws failed to increase public safety, they have also turned the clock back to the mythologized mayhem of the Wild West.

The Tampa Bay Times examined the effects of Florida’s 2005 law in more than 200 cases (about half of them fatal) through mid-2012. It reported that the law’s chief beneficiaries were “those with records of crime and violence.” Nearly 60 percent of those making self-defense claims when a person was killed had been arrested at least once before; a third of those had been accused of violent crimes in the past; over a third had illegally carried guns in the past or had threatened others with them.

Stand Your Ground claims succeeded 67 percent of the time, but in 79 percent of the cases, the assailant could have retreated to avoid the confrontation. In 68 percent, the person killed was unarmed.

The Wall Street Journal studied “justifiable homicides” nationwide from 2000 to 2010. It reported that these killings increased 85 percent in states with Florida-style laws (some states’ versions of the law were more limited), while overall killings, adjusted for population growth, declined during this period.

Researchers at Texas A&M University studied F.B.I. data to analyze the same 10-year period, and found no evidence that Stand Your Ground laws deterred crimes like burglary, robbery or aggravated assault. But they did find a homicide rate increase of 8 percent (that’s about 600 additional homicides annually) in states with newly buttressed Stand Your Ground laws. A 2012 National Bureau of Economic Research study drew on different data, but also found Florida-type laws associated with a 6.8 percent increase in homicide.

Kinda pushing the fair use limit but the WSJ and A&M studies seemed like a single entry to me.

I like the last line of the article tho: "Why must we relearn a lesson we codified centuries ago? How dumb are we?

[drm604]

1. The stupidity of these laws was obvious to me from the start.

When a valid defense for killing an unarmed person is "I was scared" regardless of the surrounding circumstances, it emboldens would be vigilantes and also makes it easier to plan and get away with outright murder.

There are people out there just itching for an excuse to kill certain classes of people, and they can do so by provoking a confrontation then claiming "stand your ground".