Duty to retreat vs stand your ground and castle laws: Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater

[TPaine7]

44. Thanks for your feedback.

That seems to invite me to act as a vigilante AND as a police officer - which I'm not - and it also seems to invite innocent bystanders getting shot by me. I'm pretty proficient with guns but I'm not a Navy Seal: I might miss; the probability of me missing is higher than a police officer. That's a big problem, one made worse if the carrier in question doesn't have military training (which I do, but not the cool Navy Seal stuff).

If your are defending yourself or another innocent person from imminent attack or death, that does not meet the definition of vigilantism. That word is grossly overused.

Remember, you have no obligation to act. Indeed you shouldn't act unless lives or bodies are at stake and your probability of hitting an innocent is very low. But even before stand your ground, if you shot someone who was stabbing me unprovoked you would be golden. Unless I am grossly misinformed, you could shoot in defense of someone at Starbucks even before stand your ground.

I like the idea of a Castle doctrine inasmuch as it says I don't cede my house to a criminal but it also doesn't give me ROVING powers. I should be able to defend my home, but defending the aforementioned Starbucks is a power given to the police. I am not a police officer. I have no business defending Starbucks, and if I could've easily retreated - assuming I could have - then only a vigilante would open fire. But stand your ground basically empowers vigilantes to do just that - maybe not intentionally, but in effect that's exactly what it does.

I still think you're misusing the word "vigilante." If a criminal had just shot one Starbucks employee and was preparing to shoot another one and you were in position to stop him without endangering others or yourself, I would think you had a moral duty to do so. That would be true whether you used a baseball bat, a chair, or a gun.

Of course each case is different. But unless I am grossly uninformed, in most areas you already were able to act in such cases and even perform citizens arrest in certain cases. Stand your ground is personal and has little to do with that as far as I can tell.