Stand-your-ground laws spread across states through coordinated NRA lobbying despite broad professional opposition

Evidence

Florida’s expanded self-defense law became a model for other states that quickly adopted it under pressure from the NRA, despite opposition by police, judges, prosecutors, defense lawyers, and bar associations. Mark Glaze, the director of Mayors against Illegal Guns, said of the NRA drive to expand the public places where concealed weapons can be carried: “Both directly and with cutouts like ALEC [the American Legislative Exchange Council], the N.R.A. is slowly and surely and methodically working at the state level to expand the number and kind and category of places where people can carry concealed, loaded weapons and use them with deadly force” (Goode, 2012). — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 1212

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the institutional design literature on how organized interest groups use model legislation and state-level ‘cutout’ organizations (ALEC) to bypass federal deadlock.
• SEED: Article angle: how model legislation and cutout lobbying groups let a minority interest override near-unanimous professional opposition.