The Patriot Post® · No Really: Stand Your Ground

Given that firearms are used over 80 times more often to protect lives than to take them, one would assume “stand-your-ground” laws would be a universal slam-dunk. Unfortunately, we live in in a time when such an assumption would be incorrect. An example of poor thinking and flawed logic on the issue is Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne’s recent dreck.

Dionne opens with a very reasonable set of premises: “The law is supposed to solve problems, not create them. Laws should provide as much clarity as possible, not expand the realms of ambiguity and subjectivity. Laws ought to bring about the practical results their promoters claim they’ll achieve. And at its best, the law can help us to live together more harmoniously.” So far, so good.

But then he attempts to advance beyond these parroted platitudes into an area in which he is apparently utterly unfamiliar, namely, analysis. He begins with his conclusion – so often the case with leftists, who begin with the endpoint at which they wish to arrive and then proceed backward. Dionne continues, “By all these measures, ‘stand your ground’ laws are a failure. These statutes make the already difficult task of jurors even harder. They aggravate mistrust across racial lines. They appear to increase, rather than decrease, crime.”

But “stand your ground” laws merely enable people faced with deadly force to use a lawfully carried firearm and, if necessary, fire back in self-defense instead of being shot in the back while running away. They are “failures,” according to Dionne, however, and confuse stupid jurors (reading between the lines), “aggravate mistrust across racial lines” (translation: make blacks and Hispanics distrust whites), and – bonus! – increase (notwithstanding facts mentioned above) crime. Please, E.J., do us a favor and don’t offer any similar “thoughtful opinions” on World War II or the Cold War – we’re pretty sure we know where you’ve pigeonholed the U.S. in the whole “good-guy, bad-guy” spectrum of things. As a helpful aside on using logic, one generally does not use the exception to a rule to “prove” the rule wrong, as Dionne attempted to do with the much-ballyhooed case of George Zimmerman and its heir-apparent, the Michael Dunn case – a case in which “stand your ground” shouldn’t have been in play.

Dionne’s central point? “Stand-your-ground laws shift the balance of power on the streets to those who carry weapons.” Backwards thinking at its best. “Stand-your-ground” laws do not “shift the balance of power to those who carry weapons.” They instead allow potential victims to defend themselves. That right precedes the Second Amendment or any state law. Who does Dionne think should have the power? The thug who has no morals or no scruples other than power? Or the law-abiding gun-owner, who would otherwise be required to run away? As far as we’re concerned, the answer – like Dionne’s “analysis” – is a “no-brainer.”