Stand Your Ground: A History of America's Love Affair with

Stand Your Ground: A History of America's Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense

A history of Americaâ€™s Stand Your Ground gun laws, from Reconstruction to Trayvon Martin

After a young, white gunman killed twenty-six people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012, conservative legislators lamented that the tragedy could have been avoided if the schoolteachers had been armed and the classrooms equipped with guns. Similar claims were repeated in the aftermath of other recent shootingsâ€”after nine were killed in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, and in the aftermath of the massacre in the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Despite inevitable questions about gun control, there is a sharp increase in firearm sales in the wake of every mass shooting.

Yet, this kind of DIY-security activism predates the contemporary gun rights movementâ€”and even the stand-your-ground self-defense laws adopted in thirty-three states, or the thirteen million civilians currently licensed to carry concealed firearms. As scholar Caroline Light proves, support for â€œgood guys with gunsâ€ relies on the entrenched belief that certain â€œbad guys with gunsâ€ threaten us all.

Stand Your Ground explores the development of the American right to self-defense and reveals how the original â€œduty to retreatâ€ from threat was transformed into a selective right to kill. In her rigorous genealogy, Light traces white Americaâ€™s attachment to racialized, lethal self-defense by unearthing its complex legal and social historiesâ€”from the original â€œcastle lawsâ€ of the 1600s, which gave white men the right to protect their homes, to the brutal lynching of â€œcriminalâ€ Black bodies during the Jim Crow era and the radicalization of the NRA as it transitioned from a sporting organization to one of our countryâ€™s most powerful lobbying forces.

In this convincing treatise on the United Statesâ€™ unprecedented ascension as the worldâ€™s foremost stand-your-ground nation, Light exposes a history hidden in plain sight, showing how violent self-defense has been legalized for the most privileged and used as a weapon against the most vulnerable.
Country USA
Manufacturer Beacon Press
Binding Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate 2017-02-14
Format Kindle eBook

Country	USA
Manufacturer	Beacon Press
Binding	Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate	2017-02-14
Format	Kindle eBook

Stand Your Ground: A History of America's Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense

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