Stand Your Ground laws help ordinary Americans protect themselves from predatory criminals every day. The good guys aren’t free to just gun down anyone they think is a threat, but they also don’t have to try and run away when a clear threat is presented. That’s the purpose of the law, to protect law-abiding citizens who use lethal force in self-defense from prosecution because some assistant DA thinks they could have squeezed through a window to get away.

In Arkansas, a law just like that made it through committee and someone is unhappy about it..

A House committee met this afternoon to take up Sen. Bob Ballinger’s SB 24, the so-called stand your ground bill that amounts to a license to kill anyone you say you feel threatened by without duty to retreat safely.

A fringe group objected that the bill wasn’t loose enough. They wanted protection even if they drew down somewhere they didn’t have a legal right to be or legal right to be carrying a gun.  (A school, for example.)

Rep. Aaron Pilkington (R-Clarksville), carrying the killer bill in the House, said over the weekend he was amenable to an amendment to change the requirement of lawful presence to use the defense and said “my party” would pass the bill with this easier-to-kill provision.

So far today, Pilkington has introduced on the House side a version of the legislation identical to Ballinger’s. Does he have an amendment in his pocket? Or is this a sign that the prosecutors intend to make good on their promise to oppose the legislation, rather than being neutral, as they agreed to do on Ballinger’s original bill?

Time and time again, anti-gun journalists and activists have presented Stand Your Ground laws as “license to kill” measures and nothing is further from the truth. In every law being considered, there has to be a reasonable belief that your life is in danger. That doesn’t mean you can shoot someone just because they scared you, either.

Yet anti-gunners don’t want people to know that. They want people to believe this is somehow about giving people the authority to slaughter folks indiscriminately, and such attempts at misinformation are morally reprehensible.

Then again, what else do you expect from the mainstream media?

Prosecutors in Arkansas aren’t exactly fond of the bill, though it looks like they plan to remain neutral on the bill as it stands but will oppose it without the requirement that someone should lawfully be in a place in order to be considered to be standing their ground.

I actually don’t disagree. Removing the requirement that someone be present lawfully means a burglar could claim to be standing their ground if they kill a homeowner who confronted them, for example.

Of course, the above-linked article does a piss-poor job conveying those concerns simply because the author shrouds the issue in his disdain for the bill in its totality. It’s clear he doesn’t understand what the laws do or, if he does, he simply doesn’t care if good people are prosecuted for murder because they defended their own life.

And people wonder why there’s so much disdain for the media these days. It’s a mystery.