If I kill you with a gun and you are not alive to say I did it, then is it always self-defense. Well in Georgia and several other states the answer is, as we already know - yes. All I have to say under Georgia’s new “Safe Carry Protection Act” better known as the “guns everywhere” law is that I felt threatened so I had to shoot you. What pushes this version, of the shoot first ask questions later “Stand Your Ground” law, further is that the gun could be an illegal weapon and it still does not matter. For example if I am a dealer on the block and I “defend” myself in a territorial dispute, this defense can still be used. Although I am not in favor of having the police ask for someone’s papers on a range of issues, here in Georgia the law specifically bans the police from checking to see whether someone has a gun permit. So the police can legally check for i.d./papers under certain circumstance to see if someone is a legal resident, to identify if a minor may be buying liquor or is a runaway, to verify identity, when there is so-called reasonable suspicion of a crime, but you can’t ask someone displaying a firearm if they have the legal papers to carry one, because now according to the law it’s a suspiciousness act.

Coming from out of state and you bring your gun to Georgia not a suspicious act; you have your gun on you at the airport, a bar, government building, on a college campus, in a library, etc, etc etc, not suspicious. I can stand outside of a bank with my gun showing and still it is not a suspicious act. The guns everywhere law truly gives you unlimited ability to carry a weapon and possibly to take someone’s life with impunity.

It seems the intent of these laws is to get us back to the 1850’s. This white-male gun movement is so scared of a future where they may be a minority population that their only solution is to run as fast as possible back to the past, to what seems for them like a golden age in America. The safety of an idealized white supremacist past where regardless of property ownership or wealth, they held a distinctly superior position to enslaved Africans and a conquered indigenous population is better than living even for a short time period with a moderate Black president and a “slightly” diminished place in the world.

This anxiety driven predicament has rallied white males in Georgia and other places to paint a picture of losing their country and having to stand up for their 1st and 2nd amendments rights of god and guns. For those who know what not having power really is these tea-party types are laughable in their claims of losing power. The laughing stops however when we look at the power this constituency still has in winning a “guns everywhere” law in Georgia with unanimous republican support and too many moderate milk toast democrats pandering to gun rights advocates. A few who claimed some opposition to these laws still voted yes, including Jason Carter the current Democratic challenger to the incumbent Governor Nathan Deal. Carter and his campaign staff somehow decided it was better to support than to abstain; potentially sacrificing his base to an imaginary strategy of pulling more white male votes in November. So as we suffer through what is hopefully the last years of right-wing, white male control of state level politics in Georgia, hold on because it’s going to be a “bang-bang” time in the wild, wild south.