I do literally (not literally meaning figuratively) get headaches whenever stand your ground comes up in the media.

Seriously, it's been more than ten years since the shooting of Trayvon Martin, and the media were getting everything factually wrong about Stand Your Ground. At this point, it's wilful ignorance or lies.

PBS -- ya know "public" and tax-payer funded -- had a segment on stand your ground in which they claimed that thirty states were Stand Your Ground states. They showed a map that claimed that California, Oregon, and Washington State weren't Stand Your Ground states. That's false. Thirty-nine states are Stand Your Ground states, including California, Oregon, and Washington State.

Stand your ground and the castle doctrine aren't the same thing. Stand your ground can be accurately seen as an extension of the castle doctrine; but, the whole point of stand your ground is that you're allowed to defend yourself outside of your castle without a duty to retreat. All fifty states, including duty to retreat states, have a castle doctrine.

Stand your ground, in no way, is a license to kill anybody who subjectively scares you. In no state does the statute say that you just need to feel afraid to be justified in killing someone. You need to reasonably fear imminent death or great bodily harm to use deadly, defensive force.

I honestly think that opposition to stand your ground is built entirely around disinformation, misinformation, and a downright lack of ability to put yourself into the shoes of people who have faced deadly force situations.

As I've said before, and I'm right, nobody pleads stand your ground. They plead self-defense. No matter what, you have to prove innocence, imminence, proportionality, and reasonableness to a point of plausibility to a judge to even argue that you engaged in self-defense in trial. At that point, the burden of proof is on the state to disprove your claims.

Bottom line -- every person who engages in self-defense is a person who was innocent, was attacked, was reasonably afraid that he or she was going to be killed or raped or otherwise seriously injured, and ended up winning the fight.

All the people who oppose stand your ground are actually arguing for is that after these innocent people were attacked, and reasonably feared for their lives, and won the fight, should be put in prison for the rest of their lives if a prosecutor can convince a jury that a woman in heels could have run away from a rapist who was wearing sneakers rather than pulling a gun from her purse and shooting the mother fucker.

Does that situation sound implausible? Juries believe a lot of dumb shit. All a prosecutor in the eleven duty to retreat states in this country needs to do in a trial is show a map of the area and show every hypothetical escape route that the established, would-be victim could have taken, and the person who was attacked and won the fight could be in prison for the rest of his or her life.

This is a dumb debate. There's no such thing as an argument between stand your ground and duty to retreat -- it's stand your ground, or duty to die.