Stand Your Ground laws have been around for decades, and while they’ve been demonized almost daily since Trayvon Martin was killed for trying to aggressively merge George Zimmerman’s skull with a concrete sidewalk, they’ve got a pretty good track record. We don’t know how many lives it’s saved, but even before it was legislation, it was case law in many states.
Basically, people aren’t required to run the moment someone tries to kill them. They can hold their ground and fight back, as God and nature intended.
But a of critics of the law decided to bash it before police commissioners this week in Kansas as the attorney general basically did nothing at all to defend it.
Missouri’s self-defense law, a lawsuit against Kansas City, and the new congressional maps are among the issues Attorney General Catherine Hanaway addressed Tuesday.
Hanaway briefly spoke and attended the Kansas City Board of Police Commissioners meeting.
During the meeting, Hanaway listened as Jackson County Prosecutor Melesa Johnson told the board about her office’s issues with Missouri’s self-defense law.
“It is absolutely a public safety issue,” Johnson said.
Johnson’s concerns about the law surfaced publicly due to the fallout from the Chiefs Parade shooting in 2024.
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Overall, her office has declined to prosecute 46 cases so far this year.
Last year, it was 57 cases.
Prior to Johnson’s arrival, the Jackson County Prosecutor’s Office declined to prosecute 22 cases in 2017, the year after the self-defense law went into effect.
“The Chiefs parade. That has caused all of us, I think, in law enforcement, to take a look at the use of force statute,” Hanaway said.
Look, what happened at the Chiefs parade was terrible, but people are responsible for the bullets that leave their guns, even if they’re standing their ground. I’m not a lawyer, but that’s the way it was framed to me by several of them. The decision not to fully prosecute the guy who pulled the trigger was their call.
They made it, and now we’re supposed to feel bad for it. Frankly, I don’t, because like it or not, stuff happens, and I’m partial to prosecuting anyone who initiated the gunfight for all of the homicides, much like you would prosecute the getaway driver for a murder that happened inside the store being robbed.
Assuming, of course, the law allows it. That might be a viable path forward, if it’s not.
And honestly, I don’t care how many cases they declined to prosecute because of Stand Your Ground. That doesn’t tell us anything at all, because most of them probably shouldn’t have been prosecuted anyway. They aren’t telling us anything other than “these are all defensive gun uses that we didn’t prosecute” as opposed to “these are iffy cases we just didn’t think we could win because the law is completely working against us here.”
The truth of the matter is, though, that our legal system was always intended to be an adversarial system where the deck is stacked in the defendant’s favor. While I want to see criminals locked up and locked up for a long time, I’m fine with not making the prosecution’s life easier on defensive gun uses. I don’t want them playing Monday morning quarterback because someone figured out that someone might feasibly squeeze through a fence and escape in the cold light of day as opposed to the night before, when adrenaline is pumping through their veins instead of actual blood.
If Hanaway won’t stand up for Stand Your Ground, she needs to find a new job. That seems clear, and she can take Johnson with her.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their extreme gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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