Stand Your Ground Laws do More Good Than Harm

To start out, I would like to define the key terms of this debate. 1. Stand Your Ground Law: A type of self-defense law that gives individuals the right to use force to defend themselves without any requirement to evade or retreat from a dangerous situation. 2. Force: Any type of physical harm to a person. 3. Evade: To escape or avoid before self-defense is used. 4. Dangerous: Able or likely to cause harm or injury. Now, I would like to present my initial three arguments.1. Stand your ground laws do more good than harm because they reduce crime Stand your ground laws are proven to beneficial to crime rates. According to "More guns, Less crime", by John Lott these laws reduce murder rates by 9% and other violent crimes by 11%. http://en.wikipedia.org... The impact of this is there is no harm associated with a law that lessens murder and other violent crimes rates.2. Stand your ground laws do more good than harm because the elderly and disabled can protect themselves from more threatening people. According to BBC A 27-year-old man has been arrested of murder after an elderly man was fatally stabbed. The man was 73. CBS Baltimore County Police are searching for the person who murdered 80-year-old Willard Dimitri Rykowski. http://m.bbc.com... According to the Baltimore County police, they were called to his home on Third Avenue in Halethorpe to check on him last week. When they arrived, they found Rykowski. He had been stabbed multiple times and was pronounced dead at the scene. http://m.wbaltv.com... Arizona Daily Star Kyle Austin Drattlo, 20, Christopher Edward Terry, 23, and Brianna Harding, 21, were charged with the July murders of Erskin, 87, and Mary Louise, 83, were found in their home late in the afternoon on July 23. Each had been stabbed repeatedly. In addition, Erskin had been beaten and stomped. http://azstarnet.com.... This is impact ful because it gives the elderly a chance to finally defend themselves, and as the topic says, they do good.3. Stand Your Ground Laws do more good than harm because citizens can protect themselves from any dangers with them. Imagine if a criminal broke into your house with a gun. He aims the gun at you. However, with stand your ground laws, you able to ground your own gun and save your life. Without them, you would have died or gone to jail for murder. Let me tell you a story. Lena Baker was an economically challenged African-American woman living in the town of Cuthbert, Georgia in the 1940s, who took whatever work she could find in order to support her three children. She was hired by a white mill owner named Ernest Knight, who needed someone to care for him while he recovered from a broken hip. Baker continued to work for Knight for the next two years and scandalous rumors began to spread that the two of them were involved in a relationship. However, the relationship was an abusive one and Knight often held Baker against her will. On April 30, 1944, Knight locked Baker up inside the grist mill and threatened to rape her at gunpoint. After he tried to attack her with a metal pipe, Baker grabbed Knight's pistol and shot him through the head before escaping. With Stand Your Ground Laws, Baker would not have been punished, since she shot the man for a perfectly good reason. This is impactful because people who are threatened should not be punished for protecting themselves from danger and saving their own lives.