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Misplaced hysteria over gun law
Florida's "no retreat from criminals"
law won't bring gunbattles in the streets, by Dave Workman
Professional doomsayers are having
something of a field day, fomenting hysteria over recent passage
in Florida of a law that lets citizens defend themselves against
criminal attack without first making an attempt to flee.
The Sunshine State's "No Duty to
Retreat," or "Stand Your Ground," law is not a novel concept,
although it is hardly universal in the land of the free and home
of the brave. In my home state of Washington -- where our state
constitution explicitly guarantees "The right of the individual
citizen to bear arms in defense of himself, or the state, shall
not be impaired" -- the state Supreme Court has twice affirmed
in recent years that there is "no duty to retreat."
The principle in both cases --
State v. Studd (1999) and State v. Reynaldo Redmond (2003) --
is unambiguous. "The law is well settled," said the court in the
Redmond ruling, "that there is no duty to retreat when a person
is assaulted in a place where he or she has a right to be."
Obviously, the anti-self-defense
crowd has a problem with this concept. Rather than support the
right of any law-abiding citizen to defend himself or herself
when attacked in any place where that citizen has a legitimate
right to be, opponents of this law would appease criminals, thus
encouraging recidivist behavior.
In their zeal to portray "Stand
Your Ground" as a philosophy of Dirty Harry wannabes, gun-control
groups and some misguided police officials are using the same
tired, thoroughly discredited rhetoric about "Wild West gunfights"
and "blood in the streets" that they used when Florida, and more
than two dozen other states, passed right-to-carry laws. Those
predictions never came true, and they won't now. Forecasts of
murderous road rage or increased danger to children are products
of the same fantasy world from which silver-screen Western shoot-'em-ups
sprouted.
Frankly, we all should want Florida's
streets to resemble neighborhoods in the Old West. A little research
would explain why. Historians Richard Shenkman and W. Eugene Hollon
have written about real violence in the frontier West, noting,
for example, that in 1878 -- the heyday of cattle-drive boomtowns
-- Dodge City recorded just five homicides.
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In a February 2004 essay appearing
on lewrockwell.com ,
Colorado policy analyst and Internet columnist Ryan McMaken noted
that "All the big cattle towns of Kansas combined saw a total
of 45 murders during the period of 1870-1885. Dodge City alone
saw 15 people die violently from 1876-1885, an average of 1.5
per year."
Compared with the landscape between
Tallahassee and Miami, the real West was comatose.
Although citizens in Washington
state have no duty to retreat from a violent attack, it is also
well established that this does not mean they have the latitude
to thrust themselves unnecessarily in harm's way. Responsible,
legally armed citizens are not a problem, in Washington, Florida
or anywhere else.
Our experience in Washington dates
back generations. It's certainly not spotless, but the Evergreen
State is not awash in violence, either. Washington, which has
had a right-to-carry statute for many years, also has one of the
highest per-capita numbers of legally licensed armed citizens.
Instead of giving the hysterics
a free pass to promote fear about Florida's new law, perhaps the
press should ask these people point-blank, "What's wrong with
defending yourself from criminal attack in a place where you have
a right to be? Why should people be vulnerable to lawsuits filed
by criminals they shoot in self-defense? Why do you advocate what
is essentially a surrender of public places to predatory thugs?"
Self-defense is not "taking the
law into your own hands." Rather, it is acting within the law
in the face of imminent and unavoidable danger of grave bodily
harm or death. Arguing otherwise, with unsustainable predictions
of bloody lawlessness, will ultimately prove just how wrong the
gun-control extremists have been.
Dave Workman is senior editor
of Gun Week
and author of the
book Washington State Gun Rights and Responsibilities.
This column was originally published in The Providence Journal.
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