This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, April 6, 2012. I'm Caleb Brown. In the shooting

death of Trayvon Martin, it isn't just George Zimmerman who is under suspicion. The so-called

Stand Your Ground Law is also a suspect.

Walter Olson is a senior fellow at the Cato Institute.

He argues that the Stand Your Ground Law is especially Florida's version of that law,

is not properly implicated in any popular narrative

of how that shooting occurred.

Zimmerman is claiming soft defense and he is claiming self defense in a way that fits into the Florida law and

indeed fits into other states law too which is the law requires a reasonable fear of death or serious bodily injury,

and it requires that the lethal force used in self-defense be necessary to prevent that lethal force

from happening to you. But a lot of people have claimed that this implicates the stand your ground laws.

Now what are the terms that present a circumstance in which one might reasonably

expected to quote unquote stand your ground.

There are so many misconceptions and I have to say that the press coverage from the very first

stories about the Trayvon Martin case have fostered these misconceptions and have misled the

public because the standard

ground law does a bunch of different things but only a couple of them are

even possibly relevant to the Trayvon Martin case.

And first look at the standard for what is self-defense.

It is reasonable fear, unreasonable fear does not count of death or personal, serious personal injury that can only be averted by using force.

That was misrepresented in hundreds, even thousands of articles where people imagined

that just some sort of subjective, oh I'm afraid and therefore I have a right to shoot.

...