On the heels of the shooting of Trayvon Martin, a killing partly enabled by Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law (see related story), comes the news that a similar law has been proposed for Massachusetts at the behest of the Gun Owners’ Action League, a group with ties to the National Rifle Association. Sponsoring the law, S661, is state senator Stephen Brewer of Barre, whose district includes two Franklin County towns and the Hampshire County town of Ware as well as a number of communities in Worcester and Hampden counties. No other state legislator from Franklin or Hampshire county has signed on as a sponsor of the law.
The proposed law is similar to Florida’s in that it gives police no grounds to arrest people who use deadly force to defend themselves not only on their own property but “in any place that they have a right to be.” All that’s necessary is that the person be acting “in the reasonable belief that an assailant was about to inflict great bodily injury or death upon themselves or upon another person who also had a right to be in the location. There shall be no duty on a person to retreat from any place that they have a right to be.”
And if you’re wondering why the hands of the Sanford police were tied when it came to arresting George Zimmerman, who killed an unarmed, unoffending teenager as he was walking home from a 7-Eleven store, it’s because the NRA shields people who carry guns and fire them with clauses like this one, which is part of the text of the law now being filed here: “An act of lawful defense as outlined in this section shall not be cause for arrest or prosecution.”
The law proposed for Massachusetts even stipulates that such an act can’t be grounds for the revocation of a firearms ID card.
