Duty to retreat vs stand your ground and castle laws: Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater

[alcibiades_mystery]

23. Bullshit

"In some US jurisdictions, there is even a "duty to retreat" when threatened in your own home. If an armed robber comes into your bedroom at night, you are obligated to flee if you safely can. It doesn't matter if you are armed. It doesn't matter if you are innocent. A criminal can dismiss you from your own home. "

Absolute bullshit. In no jurisdiction is anyone obliged to retreat if in their own home. This is settled law.

Duty to retreat means that you exhaust, within reason, non-violent means to avoid conflict. This isn't an undue burden, but a basic sense of common decency. The "stand your grounders" have invented some nonsense like your post that ,makes the duty to retreat into the "duty to be ordered around by criminals." It is a ludicrous claim. You retreat to safety if possible and call the police. If not possible, you respond with force adequate to the situation. You need not do so in your own home. This is the hallmark of a decent society, not some evil state burden coddling to criminals.

Before I have a legitimate claim of self-defense, I should certainly have to demonstrate that force on my part was necessary. NECESSARY. Your high flown nonsense about "freedom" aside, that's the simple principle. If force was not necessary, then I was not really engaged in self-defense. Rather, I CHOSE a conflict. Bottom line there. The notion that you shouldn't "have to be moved" is, in fact, the precise "ego-driven, macho" understanding of society that drives such stupid laws. The non-ego driven non-macho understanding would be that we do no social harm we NEED NOT DO. Taking stupid machismo and calling it "freedom" is not an answer.