A history of America’s Stand Your Ground gun laws, from Reconstruction to Trayvon Martin After a young, white gunman killed twenty-six people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012, conservative legislators lamented that the tragedy could have been avoided if the schoolteachers had been armed and the classrooms equipped with guns. Similar claims were repeated in the aftermath of other recent shootings—after nine were killed in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, and in the aftermath of the massacre in the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Despite inevitable questions about gun control, there is a sharp increase in firearm sales in the wake of every mass shooting. Yet, this kind of DIY-security activism predates the contemporary gun rights movement—and even the stand-your-ground self-defense laws adopted in thirty-three states, or the thirteen million civilians currently licensed to carry concealed firearms. As scholar Caroline Light proves, support for “good guys with guns” relies on the entrenched belief that certain “bad guys with guns” threaten us all. Stand Your Ground explores the development of the American right to self-defense and reveals how the original “duty to retreat” from threat was transformed into a selective right to kill. In her rigorous genealogy, Light traces white America’s attachment to racialized, lethal self-defense by unearthing its complex legal and social histories—from the original “castle laws” of the 1600s, which gave white men the right to protect their homes, to the brutal lynching of “criminal” Black bodies during the Jim Crow era and the radicalization of the NRA as it transitioned from a sporting organization to one of our country’s most powerful lobbying forces. In this convincing treatise on the United States’ unprecedented ascension as the world’s foremost stand-your-ground nation, Light exposes a history hidden in plain sight, showing how violent self-defense has been legalized for the most privileged and used as a weapon against the most vulnerable.

You arm yourself so you're hard to kill. Know the law so you're hard to convict. Let's face it, the world isn't always nice. That's why you take steps to protect yourself and your family. Whether it be that shotgun in the corner, the sidearm on your hip, or the pepper spray you gave your daughter, you meet that fundamental responsibility. But if you're like most people, your preparations still lack a critical element. You still need to know how to survive the critical fight that looms after any defensive encounter: the legal battle. The Law of Self Defense provides precisely that critical, missing knowledge. This book includes not just the laws of all fifty states, but how the courts apply those laws. It's a plain-talk analysis that makes the law easy to understand for anyone, not just lawyers. Bestselling author, Andrew F. Branca, is not only a lawyer and internationally recognized legal consultant, but also a life-long member of the gun community--more than 20 years as an NRA Life Member and Instructor, an IDPA Master-class competitor, and a 2nd Amendment absolutist. Learn how to make fast, effective decisions and confidently handle life-and-death situations both tactically and legally. Read This Book And Learn the Powerful Legal Truth That Can Safe Your Life, Wealth And Personal Freedom

Self-defense, as a legal concept, is easy to describe but difficult to apply. Generally, a person who is without fault may use reasonable force or defensive force for the purpose of defending one's own life or the lives of others, including, in certain circumstances, the use of deadly force, provided there is no reasonable alternative to avoid it. When someone begins to parse the words of this description, however, he or she runs immediately into a maze of self-defense laws that appear to be at odds with each other. Bruce Lawlor clears up the confusion by identifying the major issues that surface in most self-defense cases and by describing how the law has dealt with them historically. Its purpose is not to provide legal advice, but to illuminate the path that must be taken to decide whether a claim of self-defense is valid. It examines a variety of issues, including the duty to retreat and stand-your ground laws, what is a deadly threat, when is fear of mortal danger reasonable, and even what happens when a person mistakenly shoots some in self-defense. When Deadly Force Is Involved: A Look at the Legal Side of Stand Your Ground, Duty to Retreat and Other Questions of Self-Defense brings a bit of order to the confusion behind self-defense.

This book analyzes North Carolina's criminal law on self-defense and other defenses involving defensive force, such as defense of others and defense of habitation. It explains the rules governing the use of defensive force and includes extensive citations to relevant North Carolina case law. The book also discusses issues that commonly arise in the trial of self-defense cases, including evidentiary issues, burdens of proof, and jury instructions.

In 1865, Wild Bill Hickok killed Dave Tutt in a Missouri public square in the West’s first notable "walkdown." One hundred and twenty-nine years later, Bernard Goetz shot four threatening young men in a New York subway car. Apart from gunfire, what do the two events have in common? Goetz, writes Richard Maxwell Brown, was acquitted of wrongdoing in the spirit of a uniquely American view of self-defense, a view forged in frontier gunfights like Hickok’s. When faced with a deadly threat, we have the right to stand our ground and fight. We have no duty to retreat.

When is it right to go to war? The most persuasive answer to this question has always been 'in self-defense'. In a penetrating new analysis, bringing together moral philosophy, political science, and law, David Rodin shows what's wrong with this answer. He proposes a comprehensive new theory of the right of self-defense which resolves many of the perplexing questions that have dogged both jurists and moral philosophers. By applying the theory of self-defense to international relations, Rodin produces a far-reaching critique of the canonical Just War theory. The simple analogy between self-defense and national defense - between the individual and the state - needs to be fundamentally rethought, and with it many of the basic elements of international law and the ethics of international relations.

place of prosecutorial discretion. Protection orders that prohibit all contact between suspected abusers and their partners are designed to end relationships - even over victims' objections. The law's rapidly changing picture of the home has fundamentally moved the boundary between public and private space. The result, unintended by domestic violence reformers, is to reduce the autonomy of women in relation to the state." --Book Jacket.