One of the favorite canards of gun-huggers and ammosexuals everywhere is that women should be free to defend themselves from rapists and violent men. Of course, no one is actually trying to disempower these women or disable their self-defense — no one, that is, except for the conservative prosecutors in South Carolina who think ‘stand your ground’ laws somehow shouldn’t apply to domestic violence victims.
“(The Legislature’s) intent … was to provide law-abiding citizens greater protections from external threats in the form of intruders and attackers,” prosecutor Culver Kidd told the Post and Courier. “We believe that applying the statute so that its reach into our homes and personal relationships is inconsistent with (its) wording and intent.”
Most recently, Kidd raised this argument in vigorously pursuing a murder case against Whitlee Jones, whose screams for help as her boyfriend pulled her down the street by her hair prompted a neighbor to call the cops during a 2012 altercation. When the officer arrived that night, the argument had already ended and Jones had fled the scene. While she was out, Jones decided to leave her boyfriend, Eric Lee, and went back to the house to pack up her things. She didn’t even know the police officer had been there earlier that night, her lawyer Mary Ford explained. She packed a knife to protect herself, and as she exited the house, she says Lee attacked her and she stabbed Lee once in defense. He died, although Jones says she did not intend to kill him.
[…] In response to Kidd’s argument that individuals could not invoke Stand Your Ground to defend against violence in their own homes, (Judge) Nicholson said that dynamic would create the “nonsensical result” that a victim of domestic abuse could defend against an attacker outside of the home, but not inside the home – where the most vicious domestic violence is likely to occur.
Kidd is unsatisfied with this reasoning, and is appealing the case to argue that Jones and other defendants like her can’t invoke the Stand Your Ground law so long as they are in their home.
This perverse doctrine of Mr. Kidd’s may be more common than we realize. The National Rifle Association fights to preserve the gun rights of felons, stalkers, and abusers. As applied by prosecutors, ‘stand your ground’ laws somehow never seem to apply to women or black people who defend themselves, but only to non-black men who kill hildren and then claim self-defense. When a nonwhite male does get to use these laws, it’s usually for shooting an innocent bystander.
Although this strategy doesn’t always work on the legal system, it has worked a depressing amount of the time — and it’s a double-standard that absolutely contradicts all their trigger-happy rhetoric. The single most absurd myth of gun culture is that more guns will make us all safer from each other, but in application, women and black people who try to make themselves ‘safe’ with guns end up in prison.