Op­po­si­tion Leader Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar has con­tin­ued to main­tain her po­si­tion on stand your ground leg­is­la­tion, amid con­dem­na­tion over her call for those with le­gal firearms to 'emp­ty their clips' on in­trud­ers.

Her com­ments have been re­ject­ed by po­lit­i­cal com­men­ta­tors, se­cu­ri­ty ex­perts and oth­ers who have warned that her words might in­fuse a be­lief that such ac­tions are jus­ti­fied, even when one is not in mor­tal dan­ger.

Mrs Per­sad-Bisses­sar, how­ev­er, will do her sup­port­ers a wealth of good by us­ing some of her time on the plat­forms to ex­plain what cur­rent­ly ex­ists as law in T&T against what she is call­ing for.

In fact, Mrs Per­sad-Bisses­sar may very well find that there is al­ready suf­fi­cient leg­is­la­tion to sup­port the ex­act thing that she is de­mand­ing, and that stand your ground leg­is­la­tion is not nec­es­sary for home oc­cu­pants to take de­fen­sive ac­tion up to the lev­el of dead­ly force.

As it cur­rent­ly stands, T&T's self-de­fence laws al­ready al­low those who feel threat­ened in their homes to act in a man­ner that will pro­tect their life and that of oth­er oc­cu­pants, as long as the force used can be jus­ti­fied in a court of law.

The law is sim­i­lar to what is known as the Cas­tle Doc­trine used in oth­er ju­ris­dic­tions, on­ly dif­fer­ing in that un­der the Cas­tle Doc­trine law, oc­cu­pants are du­ty-bound to re­treat first be­fore tak­ing de­fen­sive ac­tion.

Stand your ground leg­is­la­tion dif­fers from Cas­tle Doc­trine leg­is­la­tion on two points.

First­ly, it re­moves the re­quire­ment for the oc­cu­pants to first­ly re­treat, and sec­ond­ly, it is not lim­it­ed to self-de­fence in one's home but gen­er­al­ly in­cludes all places, for ex­am­ple, a place of work, ve­hi­cle, or in pub­lic.

There­fore, to posit stand your ground law as some­thing new and ab­solute­ly nec­es­sary for cit­i­zens to de­fend them­selves, negates that it is de fac­to law here, al­beit de­fined dif­fer­ent­ly.

And while it is true that a per­son with a li­censed firearm stands a bet­ter chance of de­fend­ing him­self/her­self against armed crim­i­nals, le­gal firearm hold­ers can­not be en­cour­aged to be­lieve that 'emp­ty­ing a clip' equates to stand­ing one's ground.

There are lim­its, re­gard­less of what law we choose to fol­low.

Stud­ies un­der­tak­en in sev­er­al US states af­ter the im­ple­men­ta­tion of stand your ground laws have found an in­crease in the num­ber of jus­ti­fi­able homi­cides, while in oth­ers it on­ly es­ca­lat­ed al­ready tense sit­u­a­tions, turn­ing what were mi­nor al­ter­ca­tions in­to shoot­ing in­ci­dents, some of the fa­tal.

It is for these rea­sons that firearm user li­cence ap­pli­cants in T&T must be put through psy­cho­log­i­cal eval­u­a­tion and ex­ten­sive back­ground checks to qual­i­fy for weapons.

These safe­guards are ap­pro­pri­ate­ly in place to en­sure that those se­lect­ed are the right peo­ple who can use guns re­spon­si­bly and sift out the ones who may very well seek to an­swer the call to emp­ty a clip, sim­ply be­cause they were told by a politi­cian to do so.