Doug Clifton: ‘Warning shot’ provision exposes bystanders to gunfire

Last week’s vote to retain Florida’s Stand Your Ground law should come as no surprise, not even that, at 11-2, it was so lopsided.

After all, Florida was a national leader in passage of the law in 2005. The state’s gun laws are among the most liberal in the nation and the torrent of debate that followed Trayvon Martin’s shooting death brought out more backers than detractors.

The surprise was that the House Criminal Justice Subcommittee actually toughened the law, thus adding another layer of ambiguity and illogic to an already problematic law.

Start with the basics of Stand Your Ground.  Briefly, it does away with the long-standing “duty to retreat” and bestows on a victim the right to use deadly force either to protect himself or another.

That sounds reasonable on the surface. Why shouldn’t someone under attack be able to defend himself? In fact, he can, and always could. The self-defense defense has been on the books and in common law since the dawn of the criminal code.

By nullifying the duty to retreat, Stand Your Ground encourages confrontation and escalation of violence. Consider:

Two guys are drinking in a bar. One bumps into the other. They exchange words. One pushes the other. He pushes back, harder. Whose ground is being stood? Who, deeper into it, is the aggressor? That’s the problem with a law that encourages ground to be stood. It’s sometimes hard to decide who’s the bad guy.

Add to it the wrinkle proposed by the subcommittee. It gives the “defender” the right to fire a warning shot and not be subject to the state’s so called “10, 20, life” law. That law mandates a 10-year sentence for possession of a gun during a criminal act, 20-year sentence for firing a gun during the act and 25 years to life for shooting somebody while committing a crime.

The problems with this proposed addition to the law abound.

 First, it gives the citizen a right sworn police officers don’t have, a warning shot. In most police departments, warning shots are strictly forbidden, in large part because they have a nasty tendency to strike innocent people.

Next it encourages a gun to be introduced into a Stand Your Ground confrontation. If those two guys in the bar happened to be armed — and in Florida that might even be likely — he can feel confident he’ll dodge a “10, 20, life” charge if he draws a gun and fires it.

Finally, if “10, 20 life” applies only to use of a gun during the commission of a crime, why does a Stand Your Ground claimant need a waiver at all? The law says you’re not committing crime, you’re just exercising your gun rights. The waiver is totally unnecessary.

Dennis Baxley, the Ocala Republican who sponsored the Stand Your Ground law, says critics of his law have it all wrong. It’s not a license to shoot from the hip; it’s an effort to protect innocents from criminals. Tell that to Trayvon Martin.

It’s pretty clear the Stand Your Ground law is here to stay. The subcommittee vote last week demonstrated that. Besides, the National Rifle Association, which holds the Florida Legislature in a death grip, loves this law.

But we don’t have to accept this latest modification lying down. It’s bad law. It encourages gunplay. It exposes innocent bystanders to gunfire. It creates a problem, not addresses one.

Stop it fast, before the NRA starts beating its drums.