That's not how the law sees it. She was in the garage, alone--she was not in danger. She chose to enter the room where he was, thus starting a new confrontation. The fact that the second developed from the first is irrelevant, the key is that she went from a place of safety to a place of known danger.
Exactly! No danger! All she has to do now is stay in the garage for the rest of her life and never come out, and of course he will never ever force his way in, so she is Completely Safe (tm) in the garage of her house, forever! She was in a Place of Safety(tm) !
It’s like, if you hide behind the counter and get a gun out of your pocket so that you can protect yourself when you stand up, that’s be wrong, see, because you were behind the counter and standing up just moves you into a place of known danger. Just stay hidden until, well, until he leaves. Because STAND YOUR GROUND means you have to hide, not fire, unless you’re a man, and then it’s okay. And if you’re a cop, you can just fire at people trying to run away from you because they **COULD BE** a threat later and you are justified shooting them.
But if you’re a woman, and you’ve already been beaten up a dozen times, and your life explicitly and literally threatened, then your duty is to hide forever.
And that Loren, is exactly the problem and your callous and murderous disregard for the right of women to protect themselves from known and repeated dangers is displayed once again.
It’s handy that you have repeated ALL of your tropes right here in the last few postings, so one doesn’t even have to go far to find your viewpoint typed out.
Summing up:
- If you’re a gun-toting male who is not even in your house, you can find, stalk, follow, and confront someone and then shoot them dead and it is “self defense” for you. (Even while the other person reacting to your stalking does not get self defense, because they are black and therefore likely guilty of something)
- If you’re a cop, you can shoot anyone dead at any time and it is self defense because they might intiate an attack at any moment, using a car, a knife, a phone or their hands. Just shoot them dead, it’s self defense. You’re frightened for you life.
- If you’re a woman who has been beaten and threatened with death, the only possible chance at claiming self defense is if you give your (again, you repeated, actively threatening) attacker an even chance. And even then you will likely not get to claim self defense because you could have hidden for the rest of your life, instead.
Self Defense for men: easy to claim, easy to win. Walk away.
Self Defense for battered women: not an available option. Go to jail for murder.
So go back to the OP and see why all of your claims are simply misogyny. They perpetuate the different standards of “defense” to only accommodate situations where males need defense. I’ll paste it for your review. You’ve just demonstrated exactly what the problem is as a real-life person who actually thinks that self defense only covers men.
I am gifting this article in the NYT that discusses how “stand your ground” laws fail people who are standing their ground against “murder by installment” (an insightfully evocative phrase) from a superior strength.
Self-defense laws were written for men. This is how they fail women who fight back.
www.nytimes.com
The main takeaways for me is the new realization that we design the stand your ground laws around a certain, very specific male problem: the male stranger intruder of a man’s home or space, but that it fails utterly to protect women from the men who are already given ownership of a space to harm all those in it.
One striking paragraph:
A society’s penal code functions in part as an expression of its values — as one avenue through which we say: This act deserves punishment, this one mercy. No one wants to simply give a free pass to women who kill. But it must also be acknowledged that there are people whose lives remain beholden to forces of violence or threats of violence that they cannot be expected to simply walk away from on their own. We make this allowance when we acquit men like George Zimmerman and Kyle Rittenhouse, neither of whom for a single second were dragged by the hair through a hallway or had their children threatened with an ax. We do so because throughout the history of our legal system, we have been inclined — in many cases, overly inclined — to make exceptions for men’s violence while giving very little thought to what might drive women to the same act.
And
such women shouldn’t be charged in the first place. “As criminal law scholars, we believe that self-defense is justified,” she told me. In her law classes, she uses a kidnapping analogy. If someone kidnaps and ties up a person and then falls asleep and the kidnapped person manages to get free and kill the kidnapper, would it seem appropriate to charge that person with murder?
Frequently people will ask, “why didn’t they leave?” And you can see when you read this article why they did not. From threats to children and family members to the loss of agency that even allows the victim to consider that they even can escape it.
I realize after reading this how important it is to change the self-defense and stand your ground laws to include defense against repeated abuse, and to include
actually being supported in standing your ground when you are in your own home and
threatened not by a stranger who has just arrived, but by a person you cannot kick out and who will be there again tomorrow, or later tonight, threatening you again until you are finally dead.
