Stand on your grounds law

Stand your grounds law states that one has a right to use force when his life, properties, family and home are in danger. Generally, the law means that one can shoot first and then questions on shooting would follow. The law protects any person who uses excessive force against the person who poses danger to his or her life. The law was derived from the past law which allowed a person to apply self-defense technique when there is no any other option left. However, stand on your grounds law does not give a person a chance to exhausts all the available options and that is why it is different form the past law of self-defense.

Half of States of United States have passed this law with the idea that it will minimize violence and crime rate in those states. In contrary, there are many cases in states and federal courts on this law where victims of murder cases on the grounds of self-defense sue those who apply the stand on your grounds law. There are also many incidents in those states of shooting with a claim of self-defense. The objective of the paper is to evaluate some of the sources that prove that stand on your grounds law is tremendously bad idea and should be abolished in all the states.

The author of this article states that stand on your ground law makes the person to be the judge, executioner and the jury. If a person takes all the above responsibilities, the probability is that the judgment will be based on misconception, misjudgment and maybe racial and ethnic discrimination. The author evaluated some of the cases of self-defense in five states and saw that most of the cases involved a white man and a black man. It does not mean that black men are bad guys of United States and thus the killings of that group of people shows a certain level of discrimination but not self-defense. The article states that most of the people kill innocent people on the grounds of stand on your grounds law do it out of misunderstanding.

This law gave people a chance to carry guns wherever they go and thus if any person and mostly the mental ill people approaches a person with an intention of aggressiveness, they find themselves shot by citizens who carry guns. The person maybe is a mental ill person and had no intention of causing harm to anybody but due to misunderstanding, the person is shot to death. The author states that the person misunderstands the situation and because the law offers protection to the person, the person decides to execute the mentally ill person out of misunderstanding. This is one of the best articles that offers prove that stand on your grounds law is a bad idea and it will be of help in the final paper.

The research article tries to argue about stand on your grounds law is a law that promotes vigilante mentality. Many people have involved themselves in murder cases but they have all been released on the bases of self-defense. There are many dangerous criminals who have been released to the public after they have charged with murder just because their lawyer proves before the courts that it was a self-defense incident and the law of the state strongly supports them. The author does not blame the court but the blame is passed to the law makers of stand on your grounds law. Many people who have killed innocent people offer a clear indication that they are dangerous because they are usually found with loaded guns but the court have no strength to give the victims their justice just because stand on your grounds law is in action. This has promoted the vigilante mentality in all the states that this law is applied and thus murder on innocent people increases day by day without any action from the authority. The article clearly indicates that stand on your grounds law is automatically of no help to innocent citizens and it is just a law which promotes criminal activities in the country. The article will offer one of the strongest prove of the evil behind this law in the final paper.

The author of the article states that he at first agreed with the law but after he observed the outcome of the law, he suggests in the article that it needs to be worked on. The initial self-defense law worked very well because it was very clear that it was the last option that a person had to save a life. However, many people kill innocent people out of imagination but not the real situation and when they are taken to the court of law they find it easy to win because they suggest that it was a self-defense measure. The author states that the law must be worked on the side of the situation or the circumstance that a person should apply the law because without this amendment, the results of the law will always be negative. The article emphasizes that the current state of the law has no benefit to innocent citizens who do not know how to hold even a gun and thus the only beneficiaries of the law are dangerous people with evil intentions in the society. The article agrees with the idea of self-defense but it strongly disagrees with the idea of this law and thus it is a clear prove that stand on your grounds law is an extremely bad and evil idea. The article will offer a strong argument in support of the thesis of the final paper.

Munasib, A., & Guettabi. (2011). M. Florida Stand Your Ground Law and Crime: Did It Make Floridians More Trigger Happy?. SSRN Journal. doi:10.2139/ssrn.2315295

The article mostly concentrates on the state of Florida which was the first to pass this law. The author states that the law was passed to promote drug dealers in the state but not to protect the life of citizens in the state. Drug dealers are the ones mostly affected by this murder cases, this is because when they suspects that there is somebody who have identified their evil activities they end up killing the person and then claim that it was self-defense. Because of their financial status, they usually hire professional lawyers who eventually represent them in a professional way until they win the case. They also cross lines between themselves and the results are murder cases. The murders are also addressed as self-defense because they have the money to manipulate the court on their favor. This is an extremely evil law according to the article and thus it is a great source in the final paper.

This is one of the articles that were written immediately after enactment of the law in many states of United States. The author of the article mostly concentrates more on the justice to the victim when the law of stand on your grounds law is applied on the murder cases. The law enforcement assessment of the murder case on the bases of self-defense is the only source of evidence to prove that the person was right when applying the decision. However, it is very difficult for the law enforcement agencies to know the truth of the matter because they person involved is usually already dead and there might be no witnesses. This makes the evidence to be corrupted and thus there is very little accuracy in determining these cases. This leaves the families of the victims with a lot of pain because the justices do not prevail in those cases. The author of the article reviewed some self-defense cases in United States and he identified that in most cases, the person killed had no weapon and thus the person did not pose any kind of danger to the person. This article gives a clear picture of how this law is unjust to many people and thus it is one of the articles that prove stand on your grounds law to be bad idea.

References

Megale, E. (2010). A Call for Change: A Contextual-Configurative Analysis of Florida’s ‘Stand Your Ground’ Laws. SSRN Journal. doi:10.2139/ssrn.2397887

Geer, D., & Archer, J. (2012). Stand Your Ground. IEEE Secur. Privacy, 10(4), 96-96. doi:10.1109/msp.2012.109

Yu, Y. (2014). Deterrence Effect of Stand Your Ground Law on Crime in Eastern US States. Atlantic Economic Journal, 42(1), 119-120. doi:10.1007/s11293-013-9399-6

Munasib, A., & Guettabi. (2011). M. Florida Stand Your Ground Law and Crime: Did It Make Floridians More Trigger Happy?. SSRN Journal. doi:10.2139/ssrn.2315295

Skiba, R. (2008). Returning to the Roots of the Castle Doctrine: Why Recent Stand Your Ground Laws are in Line with the Natural Law. SSRN Journal. doi:10.2139/ssrn.2471139