Why Zimmerman verdict might not roll back 'stand your ground' laws (+video)

The fact that an unarmed teenager walking back from the store is dead in large part because an adult with a gun thought he looked suspicious – and that no one is going to jail over it – has fueled not only street protests, but also fears of greater bias-fueled vigilantism. More than 100 rallies have been planned to demand “Justice for Trayvon.”

After the jury's judgment, supporters of Trayvon's family vowed to lobby legislators to change laws so as to make it harder to claim self-defense in public places. While the US Department of Justice helped Zimmerman prosecutors with their case and is conducting an investigation into whether Trayvon's civil rights were violated because he was black, Mr. Holder, in his comments at the NAACP gathering, suggested the laws are fundamentally flawed because they threaten to change how people relate to one another by giving a legal way out for people who escalate fights.

“These laws try to fix something that was never broken,” he said. “The list of resulting tragedies is long and, unfortunately, has victimized too many who are innocent. We must confront the underlying attitudes, mistaken beliefs, and unfortunate stereotypes that serve too often as the basis for police action and private judgments.”

Other legal analysts offer a different takeaway, saying the case may actually serve as a cautionary tale that helps to tamp down any inclinations to whip out guns at times of provocation.

“This was not a victory for gun rights,” argues Jeffrey Swartz, a former Miami-Dade judge who’s now a law professor at Cooley Law School in Tampa, Fla. “I think the opposite is true: After seeing what happened to George Zimmerman … and how his family has been completely uprooted by this, and how the Sanford community has been uprooted by all of this, if I’m an average citizen I’m going to keep the gun in the holster. I’m going to make the call [to 911], but I’m not getting out of my car.”

According to a Brookings Institution paper, 100 million Americans now live in homes with guns, meaning there are about 88 guns in circulation in the US for every 100 Americans – totaling about half of the world’s privately owned firearms.

Public acceptance of the concept that people who are being threatened have “no duty to retreat,” even in public places, might be a natural outgrowth from those numbers, suggests Mr. Swartz, the former judge.

“What it comes down to is that as more people have guns, now they’re saying, ‘I want to be able to use it. And right now it’s difficult to use it, so give me a better law so I can use it,’ ” he says.

A plurality of US adults – 48 percent – agree with the verdict, compared with 34 percent who disagree, according to pollster Scott Rasmussen.

Many gun owners and proponents of broad self-defense laws say Holder's recent comments show that the Obama administration has tried to use the Trayvon Martin case to advance its political goal of greater restrictions on gun access and use. They point to revelations that an office within the Justice Department lent "technical assistance" and security to protest organizers and city officials in Sanford during rallies where civil rights leaders pushed for Zimmerman’s arrest. Stand your ground laws have been enacted to prevent the unfair prosecution of people such as Zimmerman, they say. 

Self-defense laws like Florida's “represent our rejection of a state where the government has a monopoly on instruments of violence [and where only the government] gets to decide who is authorized to take life, and under what circumstance,” says Brannon Denning, a law professor at Samford University in Birmingham, Ala., and co-author of “Gun Control and Gun Rights: A Reader and Guide.” In that way, he adds, guns and self-defense ideals “are in our DNA – this is part of who we are, for better or worse.”

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