The 2nd Amendment Reexamined: Stand Your Ground And Trayvon Martin

“A well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

                                    --The Second Amendment to the U.S Constitution.

The Second Amendment reinterpreted in its proper historical context:

“Because a well-regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.”

I would posit the argument that despite judicial and legislative precedent on matters explicitly, or implicitly, invoking the 2^nd amendment, it does not provide an absolute, inalienable right for private citizens to be armed. The historical context and circumstance under which the amendment was drafted and adopted needs to be objectively taken into account. During the early phase of the Revolutionary war, the colonists were at a substantial military disadvantage in their battles against their British overlords. Therefore, in order to prevent British attempts to disarm and eventually defeat them, the colonists decided to enshrine the concept of a citizen militia (as they had no organized military body) that was armed in order to ensure the very survival of the nascent American Republic. That was the specifically stated rationale for the 2^nd amendment to the constitution.

Needless to say, the justification for having an armed citizen militia is impractical in modern life, with all its sophisticated institutions of security. As a country, we no longer need to depend on rag-tag, roving bands of armed militias to enforce peace and deter external threats to it. We possess a military and police force that exist solely to provide that essential service, which mass vigilantism would only disrupt. And to the extent that private citizens need to be sufficiently armed to be in a position to be able to overthrow a tyrannical government if necessary, as the Jeffersonian ideal in the amendment argues, it would be impossible to adhere to that dynamic—given that government always possesses a monopoly of force; therefore, in addition to guns, citizens would need to be armed with cruise missiles and tanks to even achieve a parity of firepower—a situation unlikely if not virtually impossible. In other words, a “well-regulated militia” is no longer a necessity to ensure the security of a free state, and the “right of the people to keep and bear arms” as granted by the constitution is now rendered null and void as a result.

Despite this, private citizens, advocacy groups, legislative and judicial bodies, and countless other entities over the course of American history, have managed to create a dynamic where the romanticism, possession and use of firearms (legally and illegally) has become part and parcel of the red, white and blue American fabric. The second amendment is now one of the most well-known and passionately defended “treated-as-a-given” rights, and features prominently in the American political discourse, as “gun-control” and “pro-gun rights” groups have engaged in heated debates over this issue.

Judicial stamp of approval

 In “District of Columbia v. Heller” (2008) the U.S Supreme Court, for the first time, decided whether the second amendment protects an individual’s right to keep and bear arms, and concluded that the amendment “protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with service in a militia, and to use that arm for traditionally lawful purposes, such as self-defense within the home.” Two years later, in “McDonald v. Chicago” (2010) it further institutionalized the right by stating that the second amendment is incorporated by the due process clause of the fourteenth amendment, and hence, applies to the states (not just the federal government), clearing up any uncertainty left in the Heller case in regards to gun rights on the state level.

The mere fact the U.S Supreme Court pursued these cases can be interpreted as a tacit admission on their part to the idea that, if individuals do have a right to bear arms, that right is not unequivocally granted to them by the letter of the second amendment, and would need to be incorporated into the body of judicial law through additional channels or mechanisms. The Heller case in particular, with its “self-defense within the home” language, gave further credence to the long-held de facto sentiment that, individuals have a right to use force, evenly deadly force, to protect their property and their persons therein. This idea, popularly referred to as the “Castle Doctrine”, has its origins as a legal concept in ancient Rome, and was enshrined in British Common Law (late 1700’s) which is the foundation of the American legal system. The Castle Doctrine (also known as a Defense of Habitation Law) designates an individual’s home as a place in which the person has certain immunities and protections and may in certain circumstances attack an intruder without becoming liable to prosecution. In a world where a sense of personal, physical and material security is necessary to a functioning society, the doctrine is one rooted in commonsense.

However, following the September 11^th terrorist attacks of 2001, and the incidents of looting following Hurricanes Ivan and Katrina (2004 and 2005 respectively) a pervasive sense of insecurity and victimhood has led to the expansion of self-defense laws across the nation. The Castle Doctrine, which grants people the right to use deadly force to protect themselves inside their homes, has been expanded to give people the right to use deadly force to protect themselves just about anywhere. The legislative manifestation of this phenomenon is the “Stand Your Ground” statute.

Florida as an armed utopia

The gun lobby, arguably the most powerful lobby (next to AIPAC, the oil and gas lobbies) has disproportionate influence in state legislatures, as it essentially literally writes their gun laws, seeking to curb any sensible attempts at controlling the purchase and use of firearms. The state of Florida—the site of this Presidential cycle’s Republican Convention—leads the states in passing bills written by the gun lobby. At this year’s convention, while weapons are banned inside the convention hall, they are permissible outside, where attendees can carry actual guns that shoot actual bullets, but are prohibited from carrying squirt (water) guns.

Florida has been ground zero in the expansion for gun-rights for many years, and set a new precedent in April 2005 when then-Governor Jeb Bush signed into law the nation’s first “Stand Your Ground” statute; which has since been adopted in at least 30 other states, due to a concerted effort by the National Rifle Association (NRA) and the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC)—a corporate-backed policy-shop group, which promotes conservative model bills to Republican-controlled legislatures. The law states that a person “has no duty to retreat and has the right to stand his or her ground and meet force with force, including deadly force if he or she reasonably believes it is necessary to do so to prevent death or great bodily harm.” The central issue of controversy in the law is the question of what constitutes a “reasonable belief or fear” of a threat and how it works in its application. The law is naïve and overly generous in the faith it places in the average person’s ability to reasonably discern what constitutes a reasonable threat, because people’s threat perception levels are different and are shaped by a variety of factors, including but not limited to racist stereotypes.

The Trayvon Martin Case

The Trayvon Martin shooting in Sanford, Florida, is the product of a combustible mix of lenient gun laws and a legacy of systemic racism; where an unarmed (save for a bag of skittles and can of iced-tea) black male teen was shot to death after being pursued by a neighborhood volunteer watchman, who claimed he acted out of self-defense. Martin’s dead body was tested for drugs and alcohol while George Zimmerman was not, as local authorities claimed that the “Stand Your Ground” law applied to this incident. Zimmerman was eventually arrested after 46 days and has been released from a Florida jail after posting a $150,000 bail as he awaits a murder trial for second degree murder.

This tragedy is not an isolated race-inspired incident, but the symptom of a culture still poisoned by centuries of institutionalized racism, and is the latest manifestation of a two-tiered criminal justice system that associates black skin with suspicion and danger. Zimmerman ascribed those traits to Martin, not out of conscious racism, but out of a “reflex response”—which is shaped at an unconscious level by racist (and other) stereotypes. The tragedy at its core is a failure of the American political culture and not that of our lax gun laws which are just the symptoms. The politicians and lobbyists who appeal to and exploit people’s fears and anxieties pass legislation which incentivizes vigilantism and encourages otherwise decent people with little to no training to assume the role of law enforcement—not to defend their homes, but to bring their guns into the public sphere and invoke “Stand Your Ground” at their convenience. This state of affairs is unsustainable in a democracy and is a veritable cancer to the well-being of our body politic.