The death of seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin, an unarmed African American teenager shot dead in Sanford, Fla. as he was returning to his father’s girlfriend’s house with a bag of Skittles and a can of iced tea from a 7-Eleven store, won’t be entirely without meaning if it prompts a new look at the “Stand Your Ground” laws in Florida and other states.
The laws say that people carrying guns—and in Florida, a Petrie dish for NRA-sponsored legislation, there are plenty of them—can shoot without evidence that a person they believe to be an adversary is actually armed and dangerous.
Martin was killed by George Zimmerman, a self-appointed neighborhood watch activist. Zimmerman was cruising the area in a SUV when he spotted Martin, jumped to the conclusion that he was a prowler high on drugs, and called a 911 dispatcher to say he was watching the teenager.
The dispatcher warned him not to follow the boy, but Zimmerman, who was armed, jumped out of his SUV and ran after Martin. The two struggled, then a shot was fired and Martin lay dead.
Zimmerman claimed that he was frightened, and shot in self-defense. He was not arrested because the Stand Your Ground law makes it difficult for police to press charges in cases where people who, like Zimmerman, have gun permits say they were shooting to defend themselves.
A state where more than 400,000 have permits to carry concealed weapons; a law that fosters a shoot-first-ask-questions-afterward mentality; a little racism, a little paranoia, a little vigilante role-playing, and you get children dead on the street. The Stand Your Ground law was passed in 2005, while Jeb Bush was governor of Florida (Bush called Stand Your Ground a “good, common-sense” law). Since then, using a model devised by the NRA and the American Legislative Exchange Council, other states (Alabama, Arizona, Georgia, Idaho, Illinois, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, North Carolina, Oklahoma, Oregon, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, Washington, West Virginia, Colorado, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire) have passed similar laws, which effectively nullify an older mandate to defuse a threatening situation by retreating if possible.
Florida also lets people keep guns in their cars during their work hours. Last year its Legislature passed a bill that penalizes local officials who support municipal gun ordinances that are stricter than state gun laws, and prohibits doctors from asking patients about guns they keep in their homes.
And has the public safety in Florida improved because of the Stand Your Ground law? Here’s what Frances Robles, a reporter for the Miami Herald, told PBS News Hour’s Ray Suarez during a discussion of the Trayvon Martin killing: “One of the things—one of the types of things that happens quite a bit is, for example, you’ll have a drug dealer shooting at another drug dealer, that other drug dealer shooting back, missing the first drug dealer, hitting the three-year-old on the corner.
“And then, when it comes time to file criminal charges, nobody gets in trouble, because drug dealer one didn’t kill the three-year-old, and drug dealer two was legitimately defending himself. So this happens over and over again, where people are… not getting charged or they’re getting acquitted on cases where people are getting killed. And everybody says, ‘Wait a second. Well, where is the justice here?'”
