Marksman, I don't have detailed breakdowns of the conditions of every stand your ground law. My point was that they are almost doomed to failure, being as everyone has different ideas of when to draw and fire. Zimmerman stood his ground and was prosecuted. Bernie goetz did decades ago, and IIRC, was acquitted, but later lost a civil suit.
As you said yourself, these laws give a feeling of false confidence that at least in the case of zimmerman, led to a feeling of invulnerability. At least that is how I see his actions of hunting down a person who he believed to be a criminal, even though he had no reasonable evidence that the person was indeed a criminal, and in fact, had been instructed to stand down.
The castle laws are still inconsistent as well. The boundaries are sometimes different, but in general, what they state is that there must be a palpable threat to life, home, property, or injury. In my state you don't even have to give warning. A person here doesn't even have to allow a violent intruder into the home to use deadly force; in a situation of a door being broken down, shooting through it is covered. (maybe.)
In a case close to here, a woman who had recently divorced was visited late at night by an acquaintance who intended to rob her. She called 911 as he was breaking through her door. she retreated with her son to a bedroom and locked it. With 911 still on the phone, the guy eventually broke down that bedroom door after hunting her down to that room, and she killed him with the dispatcher still on the line.
The press expressed surprise that she wasn't charged with anything, even given all of the information. Even a congressman made an example of her, saying that if she managed to save her own life with a shotgun, nobody needed "assault rifles."
There was a guy down in tx, I believe it was, who caught a couple guys breaking into the house next door. Again, in spite of orders to stand down by police authorities, he went on the hunt, and when they passed over his property line, running like dogs, he shot each of them in the back. IIRC, he wasn't even charged. But did that really qualify as "standing your ground"? he was not in any threat by any reasonable definition and no crime had occurred on his property.
Is that the way it should have been? I don't like that.
Stand your ground laws are inherently flawed in that we are each and every one given vague guidelines, and expected to make proper judgements, and in do doing, it will encourage people to stretch the limits of those laws. Protection by the laws does not protect a person from other consequences, and any mistakes made, while legal, may still leave that person liable to other consequences. So, really, the law has changed the situation, but it has still left us in the wild west.
A few years back and old guy shot and killed a hoodlum who was robbing a store. His grandmother tearfully said that her boy was only robbing that store to get money to pay his child support. Boy, there are just so many things wrong with that... but that's not the point. He was entirely justified in use of force, but no matter what the laws were.
The point is that if we give absolute impunity, people will stretch that so far that it becomes a crime, sometimes without even intending to. If we throw restrictions at it, we wind up right where we were, in a state of uncertainty, and legal nitpicking. Maybe, for example, the "victim" of the illegal shooting wasn't armed, stood outside the hypothetical 20 foot boundary for a justified shooting, the shooter didn't speak the require warning of "you need to stand back and leave or I will be legally allowed to kill you" or whatever. Law complicates things beyond reason
Shoot, we can't even put parking laws into a simple code. Does it really matter if a car is parked facing traffic? Yep, sure does. My neighbor parked by his home, facing traffic, because he was unloading paint and lumber into his home. While he was inside, he was ticketed for parking the wrong direction, being too close to the curb, and something else, as the guy searched through his book to find other things to cite him for.
I guess, put as simply as I can do it, blanket laws give expectations of immunity that can be widely, and erroneously interpreted by individuals. Complicating the laws to clarify exactly what actions are justifiable will leave the public in danger of those laws being misused by authorities, or in other risks.
Can we come up with a law that grants immunity from civil suits stemming from use of these situations? If a person is engaged in criminal activity and shot by a victim, why should there be a de-facto double jeopardy? Shouldn't a person who barely escaped with his life be allowed freedom from revenge by criminal's cohorts or kin? Let's fix that.