This article is more than 8 years old

This article is more than 8 years old

The National Rifle Association has begun a rearguard action to shore up the controversial "stand-your-ground" laws that it has promoted across America, in the wake of the eruption of public anger over the killing in Florida of the unarmed black teenager Trayvon Martin.

Since Martin was fatally shot by George Zimmerman, a self-declared neighborhood watch leader invoking the stand-your-ground law, on 26 February the NRA has kept uncharacteristically silent. Numerous requests by journalists for the association to answer charges that it had encouraged violent vigilantism were met with "no comment".

But the NRA has now come out fighting in favour of laws that it helped draft. In a statement put out by its lobbying arm, the Institute for Legislative Action, the NRA said that what it called self-defense laws were a "natural right" that empowered "lawful people to defend themselves, and deters would-be murderers, rapists and robbers".

The statement adds that the alternative to such laws "leaves the innocent in danger".

The NRA was deeply involved in the framing of Florida's stand-your-ground law in 2005. It was that law that led police in Sanford, Florida, to initially decide not to arrest and charge Zimmerman, even though he had been tracking the teenager as he walked through the neighbourhood and despite the fact that he shot Martin outside the perimeter of his home.

Zimmerman has since been charged with second-degree murder.

The shooting of Martin has led to nationwide soul-searching over the impact of stand-your-ground laws. The mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, a leading gun-control advocate, has launched a national campaign to overturn the legislation.

A Guardian survey found that states which have stand-your-ground laws as well as weak gun controls have seen a sharp rise in civilian justifiable homicides.

The Florida law has spawned many other states to adopt similar measures, in most cases with active NRA involvement. More than 20 states now have stand-your-ground on the statute books.

America's largest lobby of citizens against gun violence, the Brady Campaign, has condemned the NRA's renewed efforts to strengthen the controversial legislation in the face of public outrage.

Dan Gross, Brady's president, said that, having remained unusually quiet for the past two months, the NRA was "back to their usual business of using fear and paranoia, tinged with racism, to justify their agenda of political extremism and selling as many guns to as many people as possible".

Gross asked whether Trayvon Martin's parents would agree that what he called "shoot first" laws were needed to "protect the innocent".

The NRA's re-entry into the billowing debate on gun laws may not be coincidental in its timing. This week a 19-member task force appointed by the governor of Florida, Rick Scott, has begun deliberations over whether the stand-your-ground law should be changed in the wake of the Martin shooting.

The panel is heavily weighted in favour of the pro-gun lobby. It is led by Florida's deputy governor, Jennifer Carroll, who sponsored the passage of the law through the state legislature.

The four current members of the Florida assembly who sit on the task force all have a track record of voting for NRA-backed pro-gun laws.

The Brady Campaign and other gun-control advocates see the NRA's statement as a signal to the task force that it is time to come out fighting.

That is made explicit in an opinion piece written by the incoming Republican president of the Florida state senate, Don Gaetz, in which he writes with his son Matt that the legislature should "stand its ground and defend good law in the face of self-serving, over-hyped rhetoric from the far left".