For­mer at­tor­ney gen­er­al Anand Ram­lo­gan says claims that the pro­posed Stand Your Ground law can have more dele­te­ri­ous im­pacts on one race are “ridicu­lous” and amount to crim­i­nal­is­ing en­tire com­mu­ni­ties.

Speak­ing on Fri­day night at a con­sul­ta­tion host­ed by MP Dave Tan­coo at his Fyz­abad of­fice, Ram­lo­gan re­ject­ed what he called “stu­pid talk” about the law be­ing able to tar­get spe­cif­ic eth­nic groups.

“And then they come with the next, next stu­pid talk. Well, you know, this a racial thing. They go tar­get cer­tain peo­ple. Well, there’s so much that is in­her­ent­ly wrong and ridicu­lous in that. First, it is, it is al­most crim­i­nal­is­ing one en­tire race of peo­ple by say­ing this a cer­tain sec­tion of the com­mu­ni­ty. Lis­ten, crime knows no colour. It has no race, it has no re­li­gion. It af­fects every sin­gle one across the board.”

He said no one in the mid­dle of a vi­o­lent home in­va­sion is think­ing about race.

“You re­al­ly think if you come out of your bed and you con­front a ban­dit, and the ban­dit have your daugh­ter by she neck, and car­ry she to rape she in the next room. You re­al­ly think that be­fore you pull the trig­ger or be­fore you fire a planass, you go stop and say, wait, wait, wait, wait. Be­fore I shoot you, you mind tak­ing off that mask so I can see, if you is one of me? Let me see if you a In­di­an, red man or African like me be­fore, be­fore I shoot you nah. That’s them fel­las think­ing you know. All they could preach is race.”

He added: “Who in their right mind in the heat of the mo­ment, trem­bling with fear, fright­ened and ter­ri­fied in your own home, who in their right mind will stop to think about bloody race? What you think­ing about is your life, your daugh­ter, your wife. That is what you’re think­ing about.”

Ram­lo­gan dis­missed any po­lit­i­cal or so­cial jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for op­pos­ing the law on racial grounds.

“So when they come with that kind of crap, you tell them, when some­body break in meh house, I eh have time, and I don’t care about his race and re­li­gion. I don’t care. What I care about is you’re a bloody ban­dit. And if I have to do any­thing to pro­tect my daugh­ter, my wife, my chil­dren and my home, I will do it. That is the re­al­i­ty.”

Stand Your Ground leg­is­la­tion has been wide­ly crit­i­cised in the Unit­ed States and par­tic­u­lar­ly in Flori­da, for dis­pro­por­tion­ate­ly af­fect­ing mi­nori­ties. Crit­ics there ar­gue that the law has been un­even­ly ap­plied, with stud­ies show­ing racial dis­par­i­ties in how self-de­fence claims are eval­u­at­ed, es­pe­cial­ly when the vic­tim is Black.