Although “stand your ground” opponents argue that the law is a racist one that hurts minorities, the reality is that black Americans in high crime areas are the greatest beneficiaries of “stand your ground” laws.
Dissenters like Al Shaprton and the Christian Science Monitor‘s Patrik Jonsson like to cite numbers from a Tampa Bay Times study showing “self-defense claimants walked free 73 percent of the time when the victim was black, and 59 percent of the time when the victim was white.”
What they fail to note is that this is not necessarily a white vs. black issue (or black vs. white). Rather, many of the defendants who were acquitted when the attacker was black were themselves black. This is why we see elevated numbers among blacks, who made up “16.6 of Florida’s population in 2013” yet “accounted for 31 percent of the defendants invoking stand your ground defense.”
Writing in the Chicago Tribune, John R. Lott explained:
Blacks are overwhelmingly killed by other blacks. Thus, it is also true that blacks claiming self-defense under stand your ground law are convicted at a lower rate than are whites. About 69 of blacks raising the stand your ground defense were not convicted compared to 62 percent of whites.
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