Beacon Press, Sachbücher, Stand Your Ground (Englisch, Caroline Light, 2017)

A history of America&rsquo s Stand Your Ground gun laws, from Reconstruction to Trayvon Martin After a young, white gunman killed twenty-six people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012, conservative legislators lamented that the tragedy could have been avoided if the schoolteachers had been armed and the classrooms equipped with guns. Similar claims were repeated in the aftermath of other recent shootings&mdash after nine were killed in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, and in the aftermath of the massacre in the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Florida. Despite inevitable questions about gun control, there is a sharp increase in firearm sales in the wake of every mass shooting. Yet, this kind of DIY-security activism predates the contemporary gun rights movement&mdash and even the stand-your-ground self-defense laws adopted in thirty-three states, or the thirteen million civilians currently licensed to carry concealed firearms. As scholar Caroline Light proves, support for &ldquo good guys with guns&rdquo relies on the entrenched belief that certain &ldquo bad guys with guns&rdquo threaten us all. Stand Your Ground explores the development of the American right to self-defense and reveals how the original &ldquo duty to retreat&rdquo from threat was transformed into a selective right to kill. In her rigorous genealogy, Light traces white America&rsquo s attachment to racialized, lethal self-defense by unearthing its complex legal and social histories&mdash from the original &ldquo castle laws&rdquo of the 1600s, which gave white men the right to protect their homes, to the brutal lynching of &ldquo criminal&rdquo Black bodies during the Jim Crow era and the radicalization of the NRA as it transitioned from a sporting organization to one of our country&rsquo s most powerful lobbying forces. In this convincing treatise on the United States&rsquo unprecedented ascension as the world&rsquo s foremost stand-your-ground nation, Light exposes a history hidden in plain sight, showing how violent self-defense has been legalized for the most privileged and used as a weapon against the most vulnerable.