Firing at ‘stand your ground’ law

Members of the Georgia General Assembly have introduced the “Stand Your Ground” bill, a bill that would allow gun-owning citizens to shoot and kill if they feel threatened.

Generally speaking, I think this is a bad idea.

If you have a gun and someone sticks a gun in your face in a carjacking attempt, should you be able to defend yourself and blow the evildoer away? Sure. That’s an obvious threat to one’s life and personal safety.

What this bill will allow though is someone to pop a cap in somebody if there is no obvious threat. The suggestion of a threat would be enough to make sure that the shooter doesn’t go to jail or pay for his or her crime.

So, say John and Jane Suburb go to Atlanta one night and catch a play in one of the edgier neighborhoods. They are walking to their car after the show and someone starts running towards them. This person is yelling something and neither John or Jane can really make out what it is that they are saying. John tells the person to stop, slow down, calm down, but the person is still running frantically. So, John reaches into the glove compartment, pulls out his gun and blows the person away. He’s not going to have some crackhead rape them on the streets of Atlanta and yet, this person was fleeing danger and looking for help.

Guess they didn’t find it.

I know that’s just a hypothetical situation and real people who could be in real danger might be saved with a gun. I would just like to stress that sometimes the threats that we perceive to be real are not real. It’s hard to not get sketched out walking along a dark, unfamiliar street at night, but how many homeless people will get plugged just for uttering unintelligible nonsense and violating someone’s personal space.

What I’m really worried about with this bill is that people will shoot first and ask questions later. It’s one thing to have a gun in your home and blast away at someone breaking into your home. You don’t have to ask any questions about that because a law has been broken and people have the right to defend their property.

When you place the situation out in public, things get hazy. What happens if you hear someone say something threatening and it’s not aimed at you but you think it is? Think about all of the road rage incidents that would be able to end in gunfire. If two people get into a fender bender and one person just can’t stand that some idiot was on his cellphone not paying attention and decides to come over and talk the situation over with his fists, that person can get dropped by a bullet or two.

The law does not require the person that gets shot to have had a weapon on them. There just has to be a real or perceived threat.

Admit it, there is a lot of gray area here.

I remember reading a story a few years ago about a foreign exchange student who went trick or treating in Louisiana and this guy didn’t like people, especially foreigners, on his property. He yelled for the guy, who didn’t speak English, to get off his property. When the foreign guy didn’t move away quickly enough, he was shot and killed.

It was an accident, a misunderstanding, and things obviously got lost in translation, but, yeah, let’s bring it to the streets. Let’s encourage the paranoid to pack heat and give them license to kill, as long as they can establish that they felt threatened.

Feeling threatened is one of the biggest reasons why kids bring guns to school, so why not make the entire world one big school hallway? If you think a bully is going to give you a metaphorical swirlee, plug him first. With the “Stand Your Ground” law, you’ll get off.