20 years in the past, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush signed the primary “stand your ground” regulation, calling it a “good, common-sense, anti-crime issue.”
The regulation’s creators promised it could offer protection to law-abiding electorate from prosecution in the event that they used pressure in self-defense. Then-Florida state Rep. Dennis Baxley, who cosponsored the invoice, claimed – within the wake of George Zimmerman’s debatable acquittal for the killing of Trayvon Martin – that “we’re really safer if we empower people to stop violent acts.”
I’m a historian who has studied the roots of stand your flooring rules. I printed a guide at the matter in 2017. My ongoing investigation of the rules means that, two decades on, they have got now not made communities any more secure, nor have they helped save you crime. Actually, there may be dependable proof they have got executed simply the other.
Prior to now two decades, stand your flooring has unfold to 38 states.
Then, in September 2025, an appellate courtroom struck down Florida’s long-standing ban at the open elevate of firearms.
Florida’s lawyer basic, James Uthmeier, briefly introduced that open elevate is now “the law of the state,” directing regulation enforcement to not arrest individuals who show handguns in public.
Beneath the state’s permitless elevate regulation, enacted in 2023, adults with no prison file additionally don’t want a allow or any coaching to hold firearms publicly.
Individually, this mix of stand your flooring, open elevate and permitless elevate is more likely to make the Sunshine State some distance much less protected.
Let’s take a look at the proof.
What ‘stand your ground’ approach
Beneath conventional self-defense regulation, an individual had an obligation to retreat – to take a look at to keep away from a violent war of words if they might safely achieve this – earlier than resorting to fatal pressure.
The principle exception to the obligation to retreat was once referred to as the citadel doctrine, wherein other folks may shield themselves, with pressure if important, in the event that they had been attacked in their very own houses.
Stand your flooring rules successfully enlarge the bounds of the citadel doctrine to the broader international, taking away the obligation to retreat and permitting other folks to make use of deadly pressure any place they have got a criminal proper to be, so long as they imagine it’s important to stop demise or severe hurt.
On paper, the growth of the appropriate to self-defense would possibly sound cheap. However in follow, stand your flooring rules have blurred the road between self-defense and aggression via increasing criminal immunity for some who declare self-defense and transferring the load of evidence to prosecutors.
Whilst supporters of those rules declare they mitigate crime and make other folks more secure, proof displays the other. The nonpartisan RAND Corp. came upon that states adopting stand your flooring rules skilled vital will increase in murder, generally between 8% and 11% upper than earlier than the rules took impact.
A learn about of violent crime in Florida printed a 31.6% build up in firearm homicides following the 2005 passage of the stand your flooring regulation. There is not any credible proof that those rules deter crime.
To the contrary, proof displays that stand your flooring rules decrease the criminal, ethical and mental prices of pulling the cause.
Stand your flooring and race
Whilst the language of stand your flooring rules is race-neutral, their enforcement isn’t. Information from the City Institute and the U.S. Fee on Civil Rights display that during states with stand your flooring rules, homicides are some distance much more likely to be deemed “justified” when the shooter is white and the sufferer is Black.
I’ve discovered that those rules have redefined now not most effective when pressure is justified however who’s justified in the use of pressure.
In my review, those rules don’t create racial bias. Fairly, they amplify the biases already found in our prison criminal machine. They offer broader discretion to a criminal machine through which regulation enforcement officials, judges, prosecutors and juries steadily grasp unacknowledged biases that affiliate Black males with criminal activity, whilst perceiving white individuals who say they had been protecting themselves as credible.
Seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin was once unarmed when George Zimmerman shot and killed him on March 20, 2012, in Sanford, Fla. Zimmerman claimed he killed Martin in self-defense and was once acquitted via a jury.
Gerardo Mora/Getty Photographs Information
That dynamic is visual in a rising multitude of circumstances, such because the shootings of unarmed youngsters Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, Renisha McBride and Ralph Yarl.
Each and every example illustrates how stand your flooring transforms unusual errors or misunderstandings into deadly results, and the way armed electorate’ claims of “reasonable fear” steadily replicate racial stereotypes greater than goal threats.
A perilous combine
Florida’s legalization of open elevate intersects with the state’s permitless elevate and stand your flooring rules in alarming techniques. Open elevate will increase the visibility – and perceived legitimacy – of weapons in on a regular basis existence.
Blended with the removing of licensing procedures and coaching necessities, rules that increase the appropriate to make use of fatal pressure create a permissive setting for opportunistic violence.
When everyone seems to be visibly armed, each and every come across can seem like a possible danger. And when the regulation tells you that you simply don’t must backtrack, that belief can flip deadly in seconds.
Florida has develop into a style for what gun rights advocates name “freedom” however what public well being professionals see as a recipe for extra shootings and extra demise.
Nationwide implications: ‘Reciprocity’ and enlargement
Twenty years later, stand your flooring rules have unfold, in more than a few bureaucracy, to 38 states. Whilst 30 states have legislatively enacted stand your flooring statutes like Florida’s, 8 others enforce stand your flooring via case regulation and jury directions that successfully take away the obligation to retreat.
On most sensible of this, 29 states have enacted rules permitting permitless elevate, and 47 technically permit open elevate, even though restrictions range around the states.
President Donald Trump has made transparent he desires to take this deregulatory way national. Whilst at the marketing campaign path, he promised to signal a “concealed-carry reciprocity” regulation, which will require all states to permit other folks from states with permissive rules to workout the ones rights in all 50. “Your Second Amendment does not end at the state line,” he introduced in a 2023 video.
If that imaginative and prescient turns into truth, it could imply probably the most permissive state rules will set the usual for all the nation. Nationwide reciprocity would permit Floridians, and different gun homeowners from permitless elevate states, to hold their firearms – and probably declare stand your flooring immunity – in another state, together with the ones with stricter laws and decrease charges of firearm demise and damage.
This prospect raises deep questions on states’ rights, protection and justice. Analysis displays that stand your flooring rules build up murder and exacerbate racial disparities. Nationwide reciprocity would export the ones results national.
Individually, the convergence of stand your flooring, open elevate and nationwide reciprocity marks the end result of a 20-year experiment in armed citizenship. The consequences are transparent: extra other folks armed, extra shootings and extra deaths “justified.”
The query now’s whether or not the remainder of the country will practice Florida’s lead.
