The Myth of Stand Your Ground

Ohio became the 37^th state to enact a “Stand Your Ground Law.” Welcome to the wild west.

It doesn’t take much imagination to see concealed carry permit holders all over the state smile with devilish glee, pat their holstered sidearm and think “next guy that cuts in front of me at the you scan at Kroger’s gets it,” or “I’m going to pop a cap in his ass,” or “fill him full of lead,” or “vengeance is mine, sayeth the Lord, and the NRA.” Or whatever the proper term is while a person is contemplating the numerous excuses to shoot someone.

Most of us will never have any real reason to shoot someone else. I am over sixty years old and never once faced a situation where a gun would have made things better. I never wanted to shoot anyone. Honestly, the thought makes me nauseous.

Yes, I suppose, over the years, on an odd occasion, Stand Your Ground may have actually saved a life, but if you read through the cases, probably hundreds of cases, most times it was a simple matter, escalated, supercharged and eventually exploded because of the belief that there would be no punishment.

Both sides can find evidence, both sides have proof, and still, people are dying. Being shot over parking places, automobile accidents, being on the wrong porch at the wrong time. Split-second decisions, with no time to think.

Now you see me, now you don’t. Somehow I don’t think this is what the 2^nd Amendment was meant to provide.

Essentially, Stand Your Ground is Mutual Assured Destruction at the neighborly level. And, while you can make the claim MAD has saved us from nuclear annihilation it would probably be safer to say it has only saved us so far. Certainly saved is much different than safe. Moreover, there is no way to prove it wasn’t the complete destruction that swallowed most of Europe and Asia and killed between 75 and 85 million people that has stopped WWIII so far.

Even though we have managed to avoid the holocaust, we’ve spent a bundle preparing for it. In 2019 alone it’s estimated that the world spent 72.9 billion dollars on nuclear weapons. That doesn’t include trucks, tanks, airplanes, warships, and the thousands of other “non-nuclear” weapon systems needed to stand our ground internationally speaking.

Of course, the same rules will apply for the arms race at the suburb level.

No self-respecting NRA member is going to stand his ground with a wimpy, finite, 38 caliber revolver when his neighbor, and main competition, is standing his ground with a 45, or a 357 magnum. Guns that let you stand your ground with a macho, menacing angel of death style.

Here is where my movie-inspired knowledge of guns reaches its limit. They may go on to the hundreds, maybe thousands of caliber or millimeters or whatever metric they use to measure the true deadly awesomeness of your ability to defend yourself. Either way though, it will never be enough, it never is.

“How do you stop a bad guy with a gun?” He asked, stretching the bounds of decency and common sense.

“A good guy with a gun.” It sounded almost simple.

“What if the good guy gets shot?”

“We’ll need two good guys with guns.”

“What if one of the good guys is really a bad guy? How do you decide which guys to give guns? Or, what if the bad guy has a bigger gun?”

“It’s obvious, we need a lot of good guys with guns. Everybody should have a gun. And, everybody should join the NRA for the low price of $45.00 a year, only $150.00 for five years.”

And here we are in a classic Post World War 2 dilemma. The Soviet Union thought America was a “bad guy with a gun,” in the form of atomic weapons. The world, they reasoned, needed a good guy with a gun. On August 29^th, 1949 they conducted their first successful atomic weapon, becoming, in their opinion, “a good guy with a gun.” Since then countries all over the world have been trying to get into the good guy with a gun business, when it comes to international diplomacy everybody is a bad guy somewhere.

What would make everybody safer is fewer guns. I know that genie won’t go easily back into that bottle but with all the shootings, all the death, we have to try. We owe it to all the people we’ve lost, and we owe it to all the people we might lose. The problem isn’t a lack of guns.

“We got guns, they got guns, all God’s chillun got guns.”[1] Escalation is a natural reaction. Stand your ground is a myth. Humanity never stands its ground, it overreacts, it explodes, the fight or flee reflex in person.

Now we’ve managed to normalize aggression and hostility. Instead of reason and logic, we can jump right to retribution. It’s a sad day when we’ve jumped from the promise of Confucianism into the belligerence of George Patton. It’s sadder still when we call it progress.

[1] Duck Soup, The Marx Brothers.

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This post is republished on Medium.

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