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

A history of America’s Stand Your Ground gun laws, from Reconstruction to Trayvon Martin

In the aftermath of the 2012 shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School, conservative legislators and school administrators shocked some observers when they proposed armed "public school patrols" to protect children. Yet this kind of "DIY security" activism predates the contemporary gun rights movement. As 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 "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, from the original “castle laws” to the radicalization of the NRA.

A convincing treatise on the United States’ deadly ascension as the world’s first Stand Your Ground nation, Light shows how violent self-defense has been legalized for the most privileged and made the most marginalized more vulnerable.