Stand Your Ground A History of America's Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense

by LIGHT, CAROLINE

• ISBN13: 9780807064665
• ISBN10: 0807064661
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2017-02-14
• Publisher: Beacon Press

Summary

A history of America’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—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—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 “good guys with guns” relies on the entrenched belief that certain “bad guys with guns” threaten us all.

Stand Your Ground explores the development of the American right to self-defense and reveals how the original “duty to retreat” from threat was transformed into a selective right to kill. In her rigorous genealogy, Light traces white America’s attachment to racialized, lethal self-defense by unearthing its complex legal and social histories—from the original “castle laws” of the 1600s, which gave white men the right to protect their homes, to the brutal lynching of “criminal” 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’s most powerful lobbying forces.

In this convincing treatise on the United States’ unprecedented ascension as the world’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.

Author Biography

Caroline Light is director of undergraduate studies in the Program in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Harvard University. She is the author of That Pride of Race and Character: The Roots of Jewish Benevolence in the Jim Crow South.

Table of Contents

AUTHOR’S NOTE
Mom the Sharpshooter

INTRODUCTION
When Good Citizenship Is Armed Citizenship

CHAPTER ONE
“That Great Law of Nature”
The Origins of a Selective Self-Defense Culture

CHAPTER TWO
Defensive Violence and the “True Man”
The End of Reconstruction and the Duty to Retreat

CHAPTER THREE
“A Mighty Power in the Hands of the Citizen”
Justice and True Manhood in the Western Borderlands

CHAPTER FOUR
“Queer Justice” and the Sexual Politics of Lynching

CHAPTER FIVE
“An American Tradition”
The Black Paramilitary Response to White Supremacist Terror and Unequal Protection

CHAPTER SIX
“The Stuff of Pulp Fiction”
Unreasonable Women, Vigilante Heroes, and the Rise of the Armed Citizen

CHAPTER SEVEN
Avoiding a “Fate Worse Than Death”
How We Learned to Stand Our Ground

CONCLUSION
Kill or Be Killed—An American Mantra

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

NOTES

INDEX