Two decades in the past, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush signed the primary “stand your ground” legislation, calling it a “good, common-sense, anti-crime issue.”
The legislation’s creators promised it could offer protection to law-abiding electorate from prosecution in the event that they used drive in self-defense. Then-Florida state Rep. Dennis Baxley, who cosponsored the invoice, claimed – within the wake of George Zimmerman’s arguable 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 regulations. I revealed a ebook at the topic in 2017. My ongoing investigation of the regulations means that, two decades on, they have got no longer made communities any more secure, nor have they helped save you crime. Actually, there may be dependable proof they have got performed simply the other.
Previously 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 raise of firearms.
Florida’s lawyer basic, James Uthmeier, temporarily introduced that open raise is now “the law of the state,” directing legislation enforcement to not arrest individuals who show handguns in public.
Below the state’s permitless raise legislation, enacted in 2023, adults with no felony document additionally don’t want a allow or any coaching to hold firearms publicly.
Individually, this mixture of stand your flooring, open raise and permitless raise is prone to make the Sunshine State some distance much less secure.
Let’s have a look at the proof.
What ‘stand your ground’ manner
Below conventional self-defense legislation, an individual had an obligation to retreat – to check out to keep away from a violent disagreement if they may safely achieve this – sooner than resorting to fatal drive.
The primary exception to the obligation to retreat used to be referred to as the fortress doctrine, wherein folks may just protect themselves, with drive if important, in the event that they had been attacked in their very own properties.
Stand your flooring regulations successfully amplify the bounds of the fortress doctrine to the broader global, disposing of the obligation to retreat and permitting folks to make use of deadly drive any place they have got a criminal proper to be, so long as they imagine it’s important to forestall loss of life or critical hurt.
On paper, the growth of the fitting to self-defense might sound cheap. However in apply, stand your flooring regulations have blurred the road between self-defense and aggression via increasing criminal immunity for some who declare self-defense and transferring the weight of evidence to prosecutors.
Whilst supporters of those regulations declare they mitigate crime and make folks more secure, proof presentations the other. The nonpartisan RAND Corp. came upon that states adopting stand your flooring regulations skilled important will increase in murder, most often between 8% and 11% upper than sooner than the regulations 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 legislation. There is not any credible proof that those regulations deter crime.
To the contrary, proof presentations that stand your flooring regulations decrease the criminal, ethical and mental prices of pulling the cause.
Stand your flooring and race
Whilst the language of stand your flooring regulations 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 regulations, 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 regulations have redefined no longer best when drive is justified however who’s justified in the usage of drive.
In my overview, those regulations don’t create racial bias. Fairly, they enlarge the biases already found in our felony criminal gadget. They offer broader discretion to a criminal gadget wherein legislation enforcement officials, judges, prosecutors and juries continuously dangle unacknowledged biases that affiliate Black males with illegal activity, whilst perceiving white individuals who say they had been protecting themselves as credible.
Seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin used to be unarmed when George Zimmerman shot and killed him on March 20, 2012, in Sanford, Fla. Zimmerman claimed he killed Martin in self-defense and used to be acquitted via a jury.
Gerardo Mora/Getty Pictures Information
That dynamic is visual in a rising multitude of instances, 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 bizarre errors or misunderstandings into deadly results, and the way armed electorate’ claims of “reasonable fear” continuously replicate racial stereotypes greater than goal threats.
A deadly combine
Florida’s legalization of open raise intersects with the state’s permitless raise and stand your flooring regulations in alarming techniques. Open raise will increase the visibility – and perceived legitimacy – of weapons in on a regular basis lifestyles.
Blended with the elimination of licensing procedures and coaching necessities, regulations that increase the fitting to make use of fatal drive create a permissive atmosphere for opportunistic violence.
When everyone seems to be visibly armed, each and every stumble upon can appear to be a possible danger. And when the legislation tells you that you simply don’t must backtrack, that belief can flip deadly in seconds.
Florida has turn out to be a type for what gun rights advocates name “freedom” however what public well being professionals see as a recipe for extra shootings and extra loss of life.
Nationwide implications: ‘Reciprocity’ and growth
Twenty years later, stand your flooring regulations have unfold, in quite a lot of bureaucracy, to 38 states. Whilst 30 states have legislatively enacted stand your flooring statutes like Florida’s, 8 others put in force stand your flooring thru case legislation and jury directions that successfully take away the obligation to retreat.
On best of this, 29 states have enacted regulations permitting permitless raise, and 47 technically permit open raise, regardless that restrictions range around the states.
President Donald Trump has made transparent he desires to take this deregulatory method national. Whilst at the marketing campaign path, he promised to signal a “concealed-carry reciprocity” legislation, which will require all states to permit folks from states with permissive regulations 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 fact, it could imply essentially the most permissive state regulations will set the usual for all of the nation. Nationwide reciprocity would permit Floridians, and different gun homeowners from permitless raise states, to hold their firearms – and doubtlessly declare stand your flooring immunity – in another state, together with the ones with stricter regulations and decrease charges of firearm loss of life and damage.
This prospect raises deep questions on states’ rights, protection and justice. Analysis presentations that stand your flooring regulations build up murder and exacerbate racial disparities. Nationwide reciprocity would export the ones results national.
Individually, the convergence of stand your flooring, open raise and nationwide reciprocity marks the end result of a 20-year experiment in armed citizenship. The effects are transparent: extra 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.
