Stand Your Ground

[stormlord]

In my view you have to look at it on a case by case basis, since there's so much crossover. What I mean by this is that distinguishing between defending yourself and aggressively defending yourself is tricky. In war and in all manners of conflicts and even in sports and in other competitions there're numerous examples of how offensive measures are seen as defensive in nature. In basketball they will often throw around the phrase "the best defense is a good offense". People may use different justifications for their actions and there might in fact be past relations with the attacker that would warrant them being suspect themselves. I just see a lot of gray here and I think that any attempt to neatly wrap all this up in a law is too tyrannical and prone to error.

There's wisdom in granting people freedoms and not just making everything either legal or illegal. There're just too many unique circumstances. People need freedom to react to all these different possibilities.

The idea that justice has to be perfect is I think an inhibiting conception. I cannot see how it will ever be so. Thus I cannot imagine any given situation always leading to a positive ending. In this I mean that the defender might make a mistake or a misjudgment. Viewed from the angle of somebody who thinks justice should be perfect, this might place the defender squarely in the suspect category - which is silly.

Nature has a way of straightening us out if we become too extreme in our approach. The problem is it can hurt a lot. It's always a race between ourselves and the balancing mechanism(s) of nature. If they fall behind or come out ahead then something bad usually happens and there's lots of shared consequences.