Oh noes, she’s onto us!
Via Guns:
If Patricia J. Williams is to be believed, Stand Your Ground laws are all about white people becoming insecure and shooting blacks. At least, this is the argument that she makes in an article for The Nation, titled, “The ‘Ground’ in ‘Stand Your Ground’ Means Any Place a White Person Is Nervous.” In her view:
The history of the right to bear arms is shaped by exclusionary privilege based on race and gender. It is almost exclusively white men who may “reasonably” carry firearms to protests outside Target or political conventions. It is almost exclusively white men who do not need to retreat from domestic disputes while on ground deemed “theirs.” Nonwhites and women, however, are much less likely to be able to walk through the world with assault rifles (or toy guns, or the shadow of anything that might resemble a gun) and not be mowed down for that reason alone—either by police or the idealized citizen-savior.
While she refers to a “citizen-savior” here and asserts later that Stand Your Ground laws, in the words of Harvard professor Caroline Light, promote “lethal response to black intrusions into spaces considered white,” most of her article goes after police action.[…]
Williams mentions, but again misses the point about the racist roots of gun control. She talks about white mean “reasonably” carrying firearms to a protest or a store, while failing to point out that in the south, carry licenses were may-issue, giving law enforcement the discretion to deny such licenses to minorities. The same is true about gun laws across the country, including the Mulford Act signed by then Gov. Reagan that so many gun control advocates love to cite.