HB 135: I Don't Think It Means What You Think It Means

"I would like to express my intense desire to see you vote against HB135.  I am often alone with my children in a rural area of the state and I know I am my children's first line of defense against an intruder.  I need to know I can defend my family in my home, or in my yard without the fear of arrest because I didn't retreat before my attempts to defend."

Now this makes perfect sense to me, people want to be able to use any weapon possible if they believe their family is in danger. And once they make sure the intruder isn't someone they know and the bad guy is still there, they have every right to defend themselves and their home as they see fit.

This is as it was and this is what will be. HB 135 doesn't address this – not at all  – not one bit. I'd love to know who is telling people that the NH Legislature is trying to strip them of their rights.

But that's beside the point. HB 135 does one thing: It removes one small part of the so-called Stand Your Ground Law that was brought to NH by the NRA through ALEC. The removal has a valid reason, this one portion had caused havoc in other states that enacted it.

While I was doing my research on the bill I ran across a news story from Georgia where a man who felt the new law entitled him to kill, saw a car pull into his driveway, and wait. He told his wife that they were going to come in after them, so he went out and killed the driver, and kept the others at gun point until officers arrived. The problem was that the car was full of kids who got the wrong driveway, they thought this was the home of a girl who was going to go roller-skating with them. The driver died on scene, the passengers will be traumatized for decades.

The homeowner really believed, and perhaps still does, that the law gave him the right to walk out there and kill. So now imagine two drug dealers in a shoot out, can the killer claim Stand Your Ground? Is this a good law for NH? 

This bill does one thing: It says that you cannot be the agressor. If you cannot  – in seconds  – get away from danger, then you defend yourself. If passsed and enacted, it will serve us all better.

So you will know what it really says, here's the bill that, if passed, will be sent to the Senate.

HOUSE BILL 135

AN ACT relative to physical force in defense of a person and relative to the definition of non-deadly force.


1 Physical Force in Defense of a Person. Amend RSA 627:4, III to read as follows:

III. A person is not justified in using deadly force on another to defend himself or herself or a third person from deadly force by the other if he or she knows that he or she and the third person can, with complete safety:

(a) Retreat from the encounter, except that he or she is not required to retreat if he or she is within his or her dwelling, or its curtilage, and was not the initial aggressor; or

(b) Surrender property to a person asserting a claim of right thereto; or

(c) Comply with a demand that he or she abstain from performing an act which he or she is not obliged to perform; nor is the use of deadly force justifiable when, with the purpose of causing death or serious bodily harm, the person has provoked the use of force against himself or herself in the same encounter; or

(d) If he or she is a law enforcement officer or a private person assisting the officer at the officer's direction and was acting pursuant to RSA 627:5, the person need not retreat.