Stand Your Ground

On the surface, the idea of "stand your ground" seems sensible. It seems right and natural to defend yourself from an attacker.

The problem is with people who defend themselves, not from an actual attacker, but from their own feelings. They say they were scared or "felt threatened". Those feelings are inside of the person who feels them, and are not the responsibility of someone else. Yet they are often used to justify killing a human being who was unarmed and behaving normally, a human being whose "threatening" behavior consisted of asking a question or getting out of a car or staying inside a car or running away or standing still.

All too often it seems that the threatening behavior consisted of having dark skin. I believe that some people do genuinely feel fear when they see a person with brown skin. Sometimes that fear becomes a terror so powerful it causes them to hallucinate. They "see" a weapon that isn't there, a threatening gesture that wasn't made. It's an irrational fear, like a phobia, and it is not reasonable to kill other people because we have phobias. ^@realrkwest