If This is ‘Academic Rigor’ on Stand Your Ground, Academia is Screwed

The website The Conversation uses the tag line, “Academic Rigor, Journalistic Flair.”

They seem to be of the opinion that both are good things, apparently. That kind of tells you where they’re coming from right off the bat, but then it gets worse when they start to talk about guns.

See, on Monday, they published a piece entitled, “Florida’s new open carry ruling combines with ‘stand your ground’ to create new freedoms – and new dangers.”

And boy, does this “academic rigor” seem to flop in the wind like a politician’s position during campaign season.

Let’s look at this little bit, for just a moment, to get an example of what’s taking place in this “article.”

What ‘stand your ground’ means

Under traditional self-defense law, a person had a duty to retreat – to try to avoid a violent confrontation if they could safely do so – before resorting to deadly force.

The main exception to the duty to retreat was known as the castle doctrine, whereby people could defend themselves, with force if necessary, if they were attacked in their own homes.

Stand your ground laws effectively expand the boundaries of the castle doctrine to the wider world, removing the duty to retreat and allowing people to use lethal force anywhere they have a legal right to be, as long as they believe it’s necessary to prevent death or serious harm.

On paper, the expansion of the right to self-defense may sound reasonable. But in practice, stand your ground laws have blurred the line between self-defense and aggression by expanding legal immunity for some who claim self-defense and shifting the burden of proof to prosecutors.

Now, note that last sentence for a moment. Let that one sink in for just a second.

That’s right, the burden of proof as to whether you’re guilty or not was shifted to prosecutors.

It’s not like that hasn’t been the norm in American jurisprudence since the dawn of this nation. “Innocent until proven guilty” isn’t a thing, I suppose? I mean, I know that in the era of cancel culture, that hasn’t held firm in the court of public opinion, but in a court of law, it has and has remained the norm.

And author Caroline Light seems to disagree, apparently. Then again, her bio tells us that she’s a “Senior Lecturer on Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, Harvard University.” That’s…well, doesn’t that tell you plenty?

Of course, Light also manages to invoke Trayvon Martin and George Zimmerman into this discussion, which really just invalidates anything she has to say regarding any supposed expertise she claims on the topic.

After all, George Zimmerman never once invoked Stand Your Ground during his trial. There was no need. Martin was sitting on top of the man, bashing his head into the concrete sidewalk. There was no ability to retreat; thus, there was no need to invoke Stand Your Ground to counter any obligations one way or another. Duty to retreat is irrelevant when one can’t go anywhere.

While the debate about Stand Your Ground raged after Martin’s killing, it wasn’t relevant to the case at all, and Light bringing it up tells us that she doesn’t seem to understand that.

Honestly, I don’t have the time to completely rip apart the entire piece, but from a cursory look, it’s not hyperbole to suggest that the author’s name might be the most factual piece of information included in this entire screed.

So yeah, if this is academic rigor, academia has even bigger problems than I thought, and considering the disdain I feel for the institution, that’s saying something.

Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.

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