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Zonie63 -> RE: Duty to retreat... (3/7/2014 7:40:59 AM)
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quote:
ORIGINAL: MercTech
The boards have had the terms "stand your ground", "castle doctrine, and "duty to retreat" bandied about for a while. I noted that many considered the "duty to retreat" as pervasive as the idea that "guns must be registered" appears in Hollywood produced television.
It turns out, upon checking some statistics, that a minority of the states (19) have some version of "duty to retreat" statutes in effect. It terns out that all three concepts have a basis in British Common Law. I ran across a succinct overview or the concepts in British Common Law and thought I'd share the link for comment and flaming.
http://www.pagunblog.com/2009/11/20/duty-to-retreat-in-common-law/
My views on this issue are somewhat mixed, philosophically. I can see that the duty to retreat would make sense from a "law and order" standpoint and the principles of what civilized people are supposed to do in a civilized society. We also favor certain principles of justice, fairness, innocent until proven guilty, and the idea that the punishment should fit the crime.
On the other hand, there are those who tend to believe that in our zeal to promote justice and fairness in our civilized society, that we may have gone too far and gotten too soft on crime. There's a perception that criminals believe they can do whatever they want and suffer no real penalty; even prison doesn't seem to be much of a deterrence. Although crime rates have actually come down in recent years, the crime waves of past decades are still relatively fresh in the public memory, along with the knowledge that crime could always go back up at any time. There is a great deal of fear throughout our society - some may be real but some may be manufactured.
It's not surprising that many people in society feel isolated, fear their neighbors and fellow citizens (most of whom also live in fear but "don't want to get involved"), don't really believe that the government can provide any real protection or justice. There may be the belief that they have to go it alone and stand up for themselves in a lawless, dog-eat-dog society where criminals rule the roost. I'm not saying that that's what our society has degenerated to (not yet anyway), but the perception exists nonetheless.
Our history and folklore often deals with times and places when people lived in semi-isolated circumstances where "law" and "justice" were too far away to be of any use to people (such as in the Old West). While it has become fictionalized and puffed up to some degree, the whole general idea of a gunfighter "doing what he has to do to save the townfolk" has become a very strong element in our ways of looking at the world and life in general.
Trouble is, it's not all that easy to tell the good guys from the bad guys. In those old Westerns, it was pretty easy to tell. The Cartrights, the Rifleman, John Wayne - all good guys. Any of their nemeses were bad guys. But in real life, it's not all that easy to figure out who the good guys and bad guys. Sometimes, they all look like bad guys.
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