- The main story is about stand-your-ground laws and their impact on gun use in America.
- Stand-your-ground laws remove the duty to retreat in public places, allowing individuals to use deadly force if they have a reasonable fear of harm.
- These laws gained attention after the Trayvon Martin and Ahmaud Arbery cases.
- Marion Hammer, a powerful gun lobbyist, played a significant role in advocating for stand-your-ground laws.
- The NRA used Florida's stand-your-ground law as a model to push for similar laws in other states.
- Determining guilt in stand-your-ground cases can be difficult due to the subjective nature of perceived fear.
- In Florida, nearly 70% of people who claimed stand-your-ground as a defense went free.
- Critics argue that stand-your-ground laws have not solved a problem and can lead to unnecessary violence.
- A man interviewed in Georgia in 2006 expressed concerns about the potential for harm under stand-your-ground laws.

- Stand Your Ground laws do not deter crime and may actually increase violence.
- Homicides have increased in Stand Your Ground states since the enactment of these laws.
- Joe Horn's case in Texas exemplifies the dangers of Stand Your Ground laws, as he killed two people and faced no consequences.
- There is a growing industry that sells specialized self-defense legal assistance related to Stand Your Ground laws.
- Racial disparities exist in the application of Stand Your Ground laws, with white-on-black homicides more likely to be deemed justified.
- Stand Your Ground laws have led to vigilantes feeling empowered to decide what is safe and who is a threat.
- The solution is to not pass any more Stand Your Ground laws and repeal existing ones.
- Several bills have been introduced to roll back Stand Your Ground laws in some states, and citizens are urged to write to their representatives to support repeal.

John Oliver takes a look at why “stand your ground” laws were created, who they protect, and, crucially, who they don’t. 

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You know, big pew-pew sticks that go boom-boom.

Guns are everywhere in America, and I do mean everywhere.

How many guns you think I can hide underneath a Hawaiian shirt?

North American arms, Sidewinder, 22 Magnum, Just in case you need something small.

That is the second most horrifying thing you can find coming at you in a Hawaiian shirt, right after John Lasseter on National Hug Your Boss Day.

Although I will say, the reveal of the Thumbelina-sized gun in his Tommy Bahama pocket was an M.

But this story isn't so much about guns themselves, as it is about 1 particular law that significantly expanded how they're used.

I'm talking about stand-your-ground laws.

And while they were initially pitched as a law-and-order measure to protect people forced to make difficult decisions in impossible life-or-death situations, In practice, they can be evoked in incidents that really seem like they didn't need to turn deadly.

The man who shot and killed a father of 4 at a fluorescent bar is free tonight.

So far, the gunman's not facing charges for the shooting at Show Me's Bar and Grill on Wednesday afternoon.

Louis County prosecutor says he needs more time to decide whether he'll prosecute the gunman.

That's because Missouri's stand-your-ground law is complicated.

Scott Barry was killed when an argument over how heavy a dog could weigh became physical.

Not only is that a massive overreaction, it's a pointless argument.

Everyone knows dogs come in a wide array of sizes, from pocket-sized sweeties to slender kings, to dense boys, to droopy boys, to big honking boys, to Standard.

Standing ground laws gained notoriety nearly a decade ago when police claimed that Florida's law kept them from initially arresting George Zimmerman after he shot and killed 17-year-old Trayvon Martin.

More Recently, they've been floated as a potential defense for the killers of Ahmaud Arbery.

And those are just 2 devastating examples of many.

And don't worry, we're not gonna show you the far too plentiful footage of people getting shot in public places tonight.

Frankly, we're just 1 senseless murder away from HBO Max putting this show in the endless parade of human misery category alongside Chernobyl and Entourage.

But given the prevalence of standing ground laws and the racial disparities in who they do and crucially don't protect, we thought tonight it'd be worth taking a look at them.

And let's start with why exactly Stand Your Ground laws were created.

Because before they came along, most states already had self-defense laws on the books that traditionally included an element known as a duty to retreat.

Meaning, you couldn't resort to using deadly force in a confrontation if you could safely avoid or de-escalate it.

Now, in many states, an exception to this rule was the so-called castle doctrine, a legal theory arguing that your home is your castle and there, you can use deadly force much more broadly to protect himself against intruders.

The key thing Stand Your Ground laws did was remove that duty to retreat from public places.

Basically, extending the castle doctrine to anywhere you have a legal right to be.

If you have a reasonable fear someone might hurt you, you have just as much right to shoot them in the street as you would if they were coming through the window of your house.

And this change was largely thanks to the advocacy of 1 woman with a pretty compelling story.

Marion Hammer says she was walking to her car after a long day at the office when she was accosted by a car full of men.

I drew the gun up through the headlights of the car, and I aimed at the driver.

And somebody in the car screamed, the bitch got a gun.

I honestly did not expect to hear that come out of that woman's mouth.

Help yourself to some hard candies in the ceramic pig?

Take off your boots so you don't track anything on the wall-to-wall carpeting?

Not in 10000 contractions of the universe.

But the important part of her story concerns what she claims a police chief said to her after she told her story publicly.

The police chief told me, well, in that situation, if you'd called the police, we'd have arrested you because you were the only 1 who employed the use of deadly force.

And that argument is the absolute core of the case for Stand Your Ground laws.

That Marian Hammer could have been arrested for simply defending herself.

But someone said that she might have been and that made her angry.

But a few things there, because while everything about Marian Hammer seems like a sweet, everyday grandmother, right down to this feline glamour shot of her posted on a cat breeder's website, you should know she's also 1 of the country's most powerful gun lobbyists, and a former president of the NRA.

She has personally helped push through dozens of gun laws in Florida alone, including a 1987 bill allowing conceal and carry permits, a law then duplicated in some form in almost every state, leading to more than 16 million Americans currently having licenses to carry concealed handguns.

So, that Margaritaville arsenal that you saw earlier, you have this Dana Carvey character to thank for that situation.

And while it's not entirely relevant, you should know Hammer's advocacy wasn't limited just to guns.

She also successfully killed a petition from 10,000 school children to change the Florida State bird to the scrub jay.

A bird so friendly, it apparently eats peanuts out of your hand.

Now, she objected because, in her words, begging for food isn't sweet, it's lazy and it's a welfare mentality, and they eat the eggs of other birds, that's robbery and murder, I don't think scrub jays can even sing.

Set aside lazy, welfare mentality, and robbery and murder, which is a lot to put on a bird.

You might want to tell that to the Scrub Jay, Marion.

Sure, the bird is no Mariah, but it's also no Roseanne.

Tweet it, talk it, put it in your pocket.

I've made a flimsy take and I'm proud of it.

The point is, Maren Hammer played a big part in passing 1 of the country's first standing ground laws in Florida.

And the passage of that bill was immensely useful to the NRA because it became a model for laws that they could then push around the country.

Wayne LaPierre openly said at the time that Florida was the first step of a multi-state strategy, and they were gonna use the tailwind to move from state legislature to state legislature, and they did.

Just 6 years later, standing ground laws had passed in 22 states.

And while Following the killing of Trayvon Martin, they became increasingly controversial.

States did not stop passing the laws, they just slightly slowed down.

And Dennis Baxley, 1 of the state representatives who helped draft Florida's bill, was adamant that it should not be rolled back.

We should stand beside law-abiding citizens.

They should not be treated as a criminal.

They're doing something positive, which is stopping a violent act from occurring.

There are gonna be times with close calls near the foul line, is it in or is it out?

Who's the assailant and who's the victim?

Yeah, there are gonna be some close calls.

Is it self-defense or is it a murder provoked by debate about how much a dog can weigh that turned physical?

And that is a little bit of the point here.

The way most state's standing ground laws are constructed, they can make determining questions of guilt incredibly difficult.

Because it all comes down to perceived fear.

Whether you legitimately saw someone as a threat, and that is definitionally subjective.

What I am afraid of, snakes, clowns, and Tilda Swinton, Jesus Christ!

And it's made even harder by the fact that often, the only other person who knows what happened in the incident is now dead.

And citing stand your ground as a legal defense has been extremely successful.

In Florida alone, as of 2012, nearly 70 percent of people who claimed it as a defense had gone free.

And advocates for these laws will tell you that that's a good thing, that before their introduction, good people were getting sent to jail all of the time simply for defending themselves.

But they never had much in the way of actual evidence for that, beyond hypotheticals like Marian Hammer's story about how someone said she could have gone to jail, but crucially, she didn't.

So, standing ground laws weren't really fixing a problem that needed solving, and the dangers they posed were pretty obvious to some from the start.

When Georgia was debating a standing ground law in 2006, a local station asked people in the streets what they thought, and watch as their third interviewee realizes something that the first 2 don't.

I think I did a lower crime myself, because a person's gonna think twice about running up on a citizen if he thinks that citizen's armed.

If you feel your life's in danger, I think it's a good law.

I think it's gonna get a lot of people hurt.

Well, because when you walked up to me in the parking lot, I didn't know who you were.

And by this law, if I felt that you threatened me, I could have just shot you right now.

And In hindsight, maybe we shouldn't have listened to the man in the Pride of the South hat that, by the way, features a portrait of Robert E.

That hat alone should have immediately disqualified anything he said.

It's like if Anthony Fauci wore this bucket hat that says, Daddy in the Shrek font.

If he did, you'd be duty-bound to ignore anything that he said.

Because the fact is, we now know overall, not only do standing ground laws not deter crime, they may actually increase violence.

In standing ground states, Homicides overall have increased nearly 11 percent since the law's enactment, whereas in states without those laws, the homicide rate went down by just over 2 percent.

In fact, another study found such laws translate into an additional 600 homicides per year.

And if you're thinking, well, come on, you can't draw a straight line between these specific laws and people's actions.

Including 1 of the very first standing-ground cases in Texas, that of Joe Horn, who called 911 to report a burglary happening during the day at his next-door neighbor's house.

Ain't no property worth shooting somebody over, okay?

I can't take a chance on getting killed over this.

But the 911 dispatcher warns horn to stay inside at least a dozen separate times.

I don't want you to go outside that house.

Then, Horn, sounding angrier by the moment, cites the new Texas law.

I have a right to protect myself, too, sir, and you understand that.

And laws have been changed in this country since September the first, and you know it and I know it.

And despite the dispatcher warning him not to go outside 14 times, he did just that and killed 2 people, with autopsy reports later showing that both men appeared to have been shot in the back.

He was explicitly told that property is not worth shooting people over, which is obviously true, and certainly not your neighbor's property.

If I found out my neighbor shot and killed 2 people to save my PS5, I would move tomorrow.

I know they're hard to get your hands on, but Jesus Christ, calm down!

And thanks to Texas' new standing ground laws, Joe Horn was never arrested, and ultimately, a grand jury declined to ever charge him with a crime.

And not only was Horn spared any consequences, he was later celebrated as a hero.

You had 911 on and you said, I'm gonna go stop them.

You stopped them, they came towards you, you shot them.

Okay, set aside that Joe Horn looks like what would happen if Bobby Hill grew up and sucked, the only time it's appropriate to cheer after someone says, you shot them, is if you're talking about the individual responsible for shooting this video of a family of bears in a swimming pool.

You saw the bears, you had your phone ready, and you shot them, right?

And if these laws on their own weren't bad enough, There is now also a small cottage industry that's cropped up around them, selling specialized self-defense legal assistance.

Most of these companies offer membership packages, including everything from educational training videos to money for future legal defense and bond.

Concealed Carry Association insists it's primarily concerned with teaching conflict avoidance, but it also gives you a wallet-sized card with tips on how to handle the call you make to police after you've shot someone, a handy feature that their founder proudly touts to its members.

Right on the back of the card, it actually lists the exact instructions on what to say to a responding officer.

Explain, I was attacked, feared for my life, and I had to defend myself.

Okay, setting aside the fact that looks like the most boring episode of SportsCenter imaginable, it does feel important to point out that they've essentially created a get-out-of-jail-free card.

And that, mixed with that man's get-out-of-jail-free complexion, is a pretty awful combination.

And at least 1 of USCCA's clients apparently took the advice on that card and ran with it.

Carlos Garcia's ex-wife, Jailene Ayala, paints him as a loving father who would do anything for his children.

She believes he was intoxicated when he showed up to pick up his kids and got into an argument with the next door neighbor, Nick Julian IV, over him playing loud music in the car.

Julian armed himself with a handgun and shot Garcia, he claims, in self-defense.

Neighbors came out as Julian IV was on with 911.

I just had a man attack me in my front yard.

It seems all you have to do is memorize a few key phrases, and you too could be free to shoot with impunity.

It's basically Rosetta Stone for justified homicides.

Because during his 911 call, Nick Julian made sure to say he feared for his life 3 separate times, and can also be heard referring to his wallet and saying to someone, you just need to call them, give them the account number and my attorney.

And by the time the police arrived, he was already on the phone with the U.S.

Concealed Carry Association setting up his legal defense before his victim had even been declared dead.

And I know it might seem like these laws are just a free-for-all to shoot someone who scares you, but the truth is, there are some limits.

And you probably know where this is going.

Because while most civilian shootings involve people of the same race, When cases involve shootings across racial lines, there are significant disparities in whose fear gets believed.

Because the odds a white-on-black homicide was deemed justified by the police were 281 percent greater than the odds a white-on-white homicide was.

And the expansion of stand-your-ground laws have appeared to worsen that disparity.

In fact, I'm pretty sure it would surprise exactly 2 of these 3 men.

Not only that, but there are multiple examples where you would think if ever a stand-your-ground law would apply, this would be the case, and yet it didn't.

Take Sawatu Salamara, who waived an unloaded, registered gun at a woman she believed was trying to hit her and her young daughter with her car.

But, even though her state of Michigan has a stand-your-ground law, And even though that incident clearly falls under a reasonable definition of self-defense without it, and even though she didn't even shoot the gun, because again, it was unloaded, she was sentenced to 2 years on the charge of using a gun to commit a felony.

And while, after outcry, she was eventually able to plead to a lesser charge, that wasn't before she'd spent a year in prison, and she was pregnant at the time, and was forced to give birth in shackles.

So, despite being introduced to increase safety, stand-your-ground laws actually increase violence, and given around 4 centuries of history, basing a law around who's afraid of who was always going to be dangerous.

It's the reason Ohio State legislator, Stephanie Howes, stood up to oppose her state passing its standing ground law back in 2018.

When your presence, when your being, your blackness causes fear.

I've been in these floors where I hear people tell me, you know people scared of you.

It's people I have never interacted with.

What do you do in places and spaces when your presence, literally, your face...

Your face causes someone to be fearful of you.

This is a bad idea for people that look like me.

That is just 1 of the things that makes these laws so dangerous.

They can exalt a white person's fear over a black person's life.

And are applied so unevenly, the Sawatu Salam Ahrar gave birth in shackles, while this guy gets a fucking parade.

Stand Your Ground laws have contributed to a society where vigilantes with guns feel they have the right to decide what is safety, who is a threat, and what the punishment should be.

They have turbocharged everything from road rage incidents to pointless disputes over dog weights.

Well, the answer is actually pretty simple.

Don't pass any more Stand Your Ground laws and repeal the ones that exist.

They're redundant solutions to a made-up problem, and they are actively doing harm.

In the past year, at least 14 bills have been introduced in 5 states to roll their Stand Your Ground laws back.

And if you live in a Stand Your Ground state, especially 1 where those bills have been introduced, you should absolutely write to your representatives to urge them to repeal them as soon as possible.

And while you're at it, if you do live in Florida, or you know what, fuck it, any state, in the interest of annoying Marion Hammer, why not also demand that they make your state bird the Florida scrub jay, so that it can maybe 1 day deliver its furgalicious victory song?

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Stand Your Ground: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)