KZA’S BODY BLAST

Carried By Six Or Judged By 12? 

 The right to self-defense gets support in Florida.  By John Hay Rabb 

In April 2005 Florida Governor Jeb Bush signed a bill based on a radical premise: that a law-abiding citizen is under no obligation to retreat from an attack when he is in a location where he has a right to be. Since the vast majority of citizens are seldom in illegal locations, the new law effectively grants Floridians the right to protect themselves virtually anywhere. I say this is a radical premise because that is what the antigun Flat-Earth Society would have you believe. The new Florida self-defense law gives them a case of the vapors, as they breathlessly predict an epidemic of bloody road-rage incidents and Wild West gunfights occurring on the tranquil streets of the Sunshine State. Never mind that several other states have already enacted similar laws. I am quite certain that if any pitched gun battles had occurred in those states, the liberal news media would have informed us by now. 

The passage of the Florida bill was hailed as a victory for the so-called “castle doctrine.” This doctrine affirms that a man’s home is his castle. In 1532 England’s King Henry VIII declared that a man may defend his castle by any means necessary, even if the lord of the castle was the initial aggressor. It hardly seems cricket that a lord should be able to assault his neighbor and then retreat behind the walls of his castle. But then King Henry was never a stickler for fair play. In the 1600s noted British legal scholar William Blackstone wrote, “The law of England has so particular and tender a regard to the immunity of a man’s house that it [is considered] his castle and will never [be] violated.” Blackstone’s view became a central tenet of English common law, and thus was created the “castle doctrine.” 

Since the birth of our nation, the castle doctrine has been reaffirmed by numerous court decisions. In the 1914 New York case, People v. Tomlin, the court said: “It is not now and has never been the law that a man assailed in his own dwelling is bound to retreat. If assailed there, he may stand his ground and resist the attack.” Now most states, even those as gun-phobic as New York, follow the same general principle with regard to the duty to retreat. A law-abiding person has a duty to retreat from an attack but only if retreat can be accomplished safely. A New York law passed in 1965 says that a person is not required to retreat unless he can do so “with complete safety to himself and others.” A 2002 Michigan Supreme Court ruling said, “A person is never required to retreat from a sudden, fierce and violent attack, nor is he required to retreat from an attacker who he reasonably believes [is] about to use a deadly weapon.” It’s simply not logical to expect a terrified person to weigh the relative merits of fight vs. flight in the blink of an eye. As former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “Detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife.” 

For the citizens of Florida, the new law sweeps away much of the legal uncertainty associated with armed self-defense and the duty to retreat. The statute, which took effect on October 1, says in part:  “A person who is not engaged in an unlawful activity and who is attacked in any of the places where he or she has a right to be has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force, if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily injury to himself or herself or another.” 

This entry was posted on Monday, November 26th, 2007 at 4:47 pm and is filed under FRAME OF MIND. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.