Op­po­si­tion Leader Pen­ne­lope Beck­les wants more in­for­ma­tion about what the pro­posed Stand Your Ground leg­is­la­tion will look like, stress­ing the crit­i­cal need for pub­lic con­sul­ta­tion be­fore the gov­ern­ment pro­ceeds.

In a me­dia con­fer­ence to­day, Beck­les said the main is­sue re­mains the lack of clar­i­ty on the pol­i­cy’s de­tails. “If you sim­ply say, stand your ground, right, and you don’t say more, you don’t say, okay, is it go­ing to be as­sist­ed? Are you go­ing to use the Flori­da mod­el? Be­cause you don’t have that at all,” she ex­plained, cau­tion­ing against adopt­ing a frame­work suit­ed for Flori­da’s unique crime con­text with­out prop­er adap­ta­tion.

She ac­knowl­edged the pub­lic’s grow­ing con­cern over safe­ty, not­ing that many feel un­safe even with­in their own homes, es­pe­cial­ly giv­en the high costs of se­cu­ri­ty mea­sures such as gun li­cences and sur­veil­lance cam­eras. Yet she stressed that the law’s ex­ten­sion be­yond pri­vate homes in­to pub­lic spaces re­quires care­ful con­sid­er­a­tion giv­en the coun­try’s own so­cial and crime dy­nam­ics.

Beck­les point­ed to the need for com­pre­hen­sive dis­course on the root caus­es of crime along­side any le­gal re­forms, say­ing, “You can de­vel­op a whole cul­ture where peo­ple be­lieve that, you know, you’re in the wild, wild west so every­body should have a gun.”

She re­it­er­at­ed the Op­po­si­tion’s will­ing­ness to col­lab­o­rate if the gov­ern­ment presents “good leg­is­la­tion” but in­sist­ed that “con­sul­ta­tion is ab­solute­ly crit­i­cal” to en­sure pub­lic un­der­stand­ing and sup­port.