stand your ground. yes? no?

[petronius]

5. My preference now is for the law to be silent on both stand-your-ground

and duty-to-retreat - an implicit rather than an explicit SYG, like we have in CA as I understand it.

While I think the moral and ethical thing is to retreat whenever possible, I think it's inappropriate to to have a DTR written into the law, opening up the question of whether retreat was possible to second-guessing and after-the-fact judgement. If a person is legitimately threatened, then I don't think the timing of their use of defensive force should be questioned.

On the other hand, explicit SYG laws seem to be misunderstood by a lot of people, including police departments, and seem to distract from and undermine the question of whether defense was legitimate in the first place.

So I'd prefer to see the emphasis entirely on the reasonableness of the threat itself: was the person employing defensive force legitimately facing an imminent and severe threat to justify the use of force? If so, then I don't think it's fair to ask them to prove they couldn't retreat on top of that. But I don't like the signal that SYG seems to be sending, at least to some people, that your right to be somewhere means more than whether you're really threatened in making a 'defensive' decision...

(Here's my similar post from two months ago, maybe it's clearer.)