After all, my home is my castle. It’s where my wife and kids are, and it’s hard to imagine a situation where there’s loud pounding, that late, that doesn’t involve a degree of urgency. I have a constitutional and a human right, guaranteed under the Second Amendment, to defend my family, my life, and my home.
Unless, of course, the people pounding on the door are cops who 1) had no search warrant, 2) didn’t turn on their emergency lights, 3) didn’t identify themselves as police, 4) misunderstood a neighbor’s directions, and 5) showed up at the wrong house, the house of a completely innocent man. Then, my right to defend myself turns into a right to die in two seconds flat, without firing a shot or even chambering a round.
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Deputy Sylvester testified that Scott “flung open” the door and pointed his gun directly at his face. The plaintiffs presented evidence that when Scott opened the door and saw a man outside crouching with a gun, he immediately retreated, and his gun was at all times pointed down at his side. This next part is critical for understanding the danger of the court’s reasoning: Through the quirks of civil procedure, the court was required to evaluate the case as if the plaintiffs’ account was true.
Pay close attention, citizens of the Eleventh Circuit (that’s Alabama, Georgia, and Florida). If you exercise your constitutional right to keep and bear arms in your own home, agents of the state who show up at the wrong house and don’t announce themselves can kill you with legal impunity, even if you are retreating — and even if you point your gun at the ground.
As Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern notes in an excellent piece about the ruling, this is now the second federal court of appeals (the other being the Fourth Circuit, in an opinion I wrote about in January) that has essentially held that exercising your Second Amendment rights means diminishing your Fourth Amendment rights.
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