Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) said Thursday that Florida’s “Stand Your Ground” law, made famous by the death of Trayvon Martin, leads to more violence and should be changed.
“I think the Florida law ought to be changed,” Nelson said on MSNBC’s ‘Andrea Mitchell Reports.’ “I think where there are the extreme cases, for example, a guy gets into a fight, he leaves, goes to his car, gets a gun and comes back and kills the person he was fighting. To use Stand Your Ground in that circumstance is ridiculous.”
“And yet in 200 cases in my state of Florida, they go all over the waterfront as to how they’ve been adjudicated, so I think the law needs to be considerably tightened and since it is in about two dozen states, you’re not going to wipe out the laws,” he continued. “Maybe down the road we do need to change these and completely eliminate them, but in the meantime they need to be severely constricted.”
