Michael Drejka, who shot an unarmed black man in a Florida parking lot, has been charged with manslaughter.

The prosecutor’s decision comes despite Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri’s previous comments that he wouldn’t arrest and charge Drejka due to Florida’s controversial “stand your ground” law. Gualtieri suggested that the law shielded Drejka from charges. But it was ultimately up to prosecutors to make the final charging decision, and State Attorney Bernie McCabe announced that he was filing charges on Monday.

Drejka shot and killed Markeis McGlockton on July 19, during a dispute over a handicap space. Based on surveillance video and reports of the encounter, McGlockton and his 5-year-old son were in the Circle A Food Store in Clearwater, Florida, on July 19 when Drejka approached their car, which was parked in a handicap space. McGlockton’s partner, Britany Jacobs, was in the car with the couple’s other kids. Drejka and Jacobs began arguing over whether McGlockton and Jacobs were allowed to park there.

McGlockton then came out of the convenience store and pushed Drejka to the ground. As McGlockton began to back away, Drejka pulled out a gun and shot McGlockton in the chest. McGlockton then ran into the convenience store. He was taken to the hospital, but he was pronounced dead.

Warning: graphic footage of a shooting:

Florida’s “stand your ground” statute, in short, gives a person the right to use deadly force “if he or she reasonably believes that using or threatening to use such force is necessary to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm to himself or herself or another or to prevent the imminent commission of a forcible felony,” all without a “duty to retreat.”

The sheriff explained that while McGlockton’s back-off after the shove gave him “pause,” ultimately Drejka said he was worried that he would be struck again. At a press conference, Sheriff Gualtieri emphasized that this wasn’t a small push: “This wasn’t a shove, this wasn’t just a tap. He slammed him to the ground.”

Drejka had a legal concealed carry permit, according to the sheriff.

Drejka also reportedly has a history of confronting people over handicap spaces, allegedly threatening to shoot a trucker in the past over the issue. But the sheriff said that, legally, Drejka’s history isn’t relevant to the July 19 shooting.

Jacobs previously told Good Morning America that McGlockton was “defending me and his children,” and that she wants “justice.” Her other two children, along with the couple’s 5-year-old son, were also present at the shooting.

The shooting sparked debates about “stand your ground” laws and the wide availability of guns in America — reopening questions about whether these measures are really making people safer. But even some supporters of “stand your ground” laws, including the National Rifle Association, Republican lawmakers, and conservative pundits, contested the sheriff’s initial application of the law in this case.

The law does mean, however, that prosecutors may have to disprove a “stand your ground” defense, following revisions to the Florida statute last year that put the burden of proof on prosecutors instead of the defense. That could make the case harder for prosecutors.

There’s a racial element too: Drejka was white and McGlockton was black. That has echoes of one of the last times Florida’s “stand your ground” law came up in a major public debate — when George Zimmerman, who’s white and Hispanic, in 2012 followed and then shot and killed black teenager Trayvon Martin. For many, the shooting — and Zimmerman’s eventual acquittal — was an example of the law giving deference to a white man in the shooting of a black boy.

What “stand your ground laws” actually do

Under standard self-defense laws, someone who’s facing a dangerous threat must retreat if it’s safe to do so, with use of force only legally available as a last resort — what’s called the “duty to retreat.” So through this standard, you can only use deadly force if you cannot safely avoid harm or death by, for example, running away or hiding.

But if a “stand your ground” law is in place, someone can, well, stand his ground, and use up to lethal force even if he can safely retreat while under imminent threat. There are also “castle doctrine” laws, which remove the duty to retreat in a legally occupied setting, such as your home, office, or car (your “castle”). “Stand your ground” is an expansion of “castle doctrine”: While the latter only removes the duty to retreat in your home, the former removes the duty to retreat everywhere — whether you’re in a grocery store, in a park, or on a street.

These legal concepts go back to 17th-century English common law, in which much of American law still finds its basis. The idea was that the king and his soldiers would keep the peace, while everyone else should step aside and avoid violence whenever possible. Similarly, in America today, we expect people to step aside to avoid civilian violence as much as possible while police protect us instead. So if you’re in a dangerous situation, you’re expected to retreat if you can, and call on the police to protect you if necessary.

“Stand your ground” captured a lot of media attention after Martin’s death because it was widely believed that it would play a role in Zimmerman’s defense. But that was overstated: During the trial, it was only mentioned in the jury instructions and in passing by the prosecutor. Zimmerman was acquitted under a more typical self-defense argument.

Zimmerman never appeared to have a chance to retreat once he got into a fight with Martin. His injuries and the forensic evidence suggest that he was lying on the ground with Martin on top of him and hitting him as he opened fire. In those last moments, Zimmerman was under serious physical threat and couldn’t retreat, so he was legally allowed to use force under a typical self-defense law. (Of course, there’s an open question of whether Zimmerman could have avoided the entire encounter to begin with by simply not following Martin after a police dispatcher told him not to. But self-defense law is generally about whether you’re under threat at the moment you use force, not what happened beforehand.)

This is a key point with “stand your ground” laws: They are only relevant if you can safely retreat from an attack. If you can’t safely retreat, a more standard self-defense law will protect your use of force. If you can safely retreat, a “stand your ground” law is needed to justify use of force — unless you’re in your home, where a “castle doctrine” law may apply.

In the case of McGlockton and Drejka, the sheriff has said that Drejka “told deputies that he had to shoot to defend himself. Those are the facts and that’s the law.” He added, “No matter how you slice it or dice it, that was a violent push to the ground.” He claimed that the law, whether he agrees with it or not, puts a high burden of evidence on the state to show that Drejka was not able to use a “stand your ground” defense.

But Caroline Light, a Harvard professor and expert on these laws, told the New York Times, “[McGlockton] shoves [Drejka], seemingly in an effort to get him away from his girlfriend, and then walks away. The video would suggest it’s actually not reasonable for [Drejka] to fear for his life.” If true, that would mean that Drejka did not meet a key requirement to using lethal force, even under “stand your ground” laws.

The NRA and some Republican lawmakers, who support “stand your ground” and helped pass it into law, have also contested the sheriff’s claims that he couldn’t even arrest Drejka due to “stand your ground.”

“Nothing in either the 2005 law or the 2017 law prohibits a Sheriff from making an arrest in a case where a person claims self-defense if there is probable cause that the use of force was unlawful,” Marion Hammer, an NRA lobbyist in Florida, told Politico, although she declined to discuss the specifics of the Drejka-McGlockton case.

Ultimately, prosecutors filed charges in the case.

“Stand your ground” laws make the public less safe

Despite the controversy surrounding “stand your ground” laws, they have spread rapidly, from only Florida in 2005 to 25 states, according to the Giffords Law Center.

Much of this was part of a deliberate lobbying effort, particularly by the NRA. At its core, the NRA supports the idea that people should be able to use deadly force to defend themselves from dangerous threats, with little government intervention getting in the way. Hence not just the legal ability to purchase and own a gun but the legal ability to use it even when safely retreating may be possible.

So the NRA and its conservative partners, like the right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), have lobbied state lawmakers to pass “stand your ground” laws. This was part of a deliberate nationwide plan: When Florida became the first state to pass a “stand your ground” law in 2005, NRA executive vice president Wayne LaPierre called it the “first step of a multi-state strategy.”

Supporters of “stand your ground” laws argue that they not only legally allow people to defend themselves from criminal acts but also deter would-be criminals from carrying out an attack. The thinking is simple: If would-be criminals know that just about anyone can turn around and use up to lethal force when under threat, these wrongdoers are going to be less likely to carry out criminal acts. The effect of this, advocates argue, is a safer society overall.

But the research doesn’t support this. Instead, studies support the big argument against “stand your ground” laws: that they legally empower people to use force even when it’s not necessary, and that appears to lead to more unnecessary violence.

A 2016 review of the research, published in Epidemiologic Reviews, found that most big studies looking at “stand your ground” and similar “castle doctrine” laws — which only remove the duty to retreat in your home — found that they actually correlated with increases in homicides. The one study that found “castle doctrine” was associated with reductions in homicides came from a widely discredited researcher. The others found increases in homicides associated with “stand your ground” and “castle doctrine” laws.

Researchers summarized one of the more recent studies they reviewed: “stand your ground laws were associated with a 6.8% increase in homicide rates, mainly driven by increments (14.7%) in homicide rates among white males.”

Correlation is not causation, so it’s possible that something else is behind the rise in homicides. But the 2016 review of the research, which also looked at laws related to guns that go beyond “stand your ground” and “castle doctrine,” found time and time again that when governments ease access to guns — and make it easier to use such deadly weapons — there are more gun deaths.

Another review of the research, from the RAND Corporation, produced similar findings. It found “moderate evidence” that “stand your ground” laws lead to increases in violent crime. It also linked laws that loosen access to guns, including concealed carry permit measures, to more gun deaths and crime.

In general, this is backed by an even broader body of research that has repeatedly found that more access to guns leads to more gun deaths in America.

As a breakthrough analysis by UC Berkeley’s Franklin Zimring and Gordon Hawkins in the 1990s found, it’s not even that the US has more crime than other developed countries. This chart, based on data from Jeffrey Swanson at Duke University, shows that the US is not an outlier when it comes to overall crime:

Instead, the US appears to have more lethal violence — and that’s driven in large part by the prevalence of guns.

”A series of specific comparisons of the death rates from property crime and assault in New York City and London show how enormous differences in death risk can be explained even while general patterns are similar,” Zimring and Hawkins wrote. “A preference for crimes of personal force and the willingness and ability to use guns in robbery make similar levels of property crime 54 times as deadly in New York City as in London.”

This is in many ways intuitive: People of every country get into arguments and fights with friends, family, and peers. But in the US, it’s much more likely that someone will get angry during an argument and be able to pull out a gun and kill someone.

Consider Drejka shooting and killing McGlockton: What would have happened if Drejka didn’t have a gun? It’s difficult to speculate, but the presence of the firearm made it much more likely that Drejka was able to escalate what otherwise could have been a non-deadly, if physical, encounter.

Stronger gun laws could help combat this. A 2016 review of 130 studies in 10 countries, published in Epidemiologic Reviews, found that new legal restrictions on owning and purchasing guns tended to be followed by a drop in gun violence — a strong indicator that restricting access to guns can save lives.

Americans may look at these studies and conclude that it’s still important for them to have the means to legally protect themselves by keeping easy access to guns and an easier time legally using them. But the research suggests that this does ultimately come at the cost of some lives.

There’s a racial component to this shooting

On top of the already contentious debate about guns and “stand your ground” laws, Drejka’s shooting of McGlockton also raised questions about race.

Research shows that Americans are generally more likely to see black people as a threat — and that may, in situations like these, make it more likely for someone to feel some need to “defend” himself.

One series of studies, released last year, used various visual tests to see how people perceive the bodies of white and black men. The findings were consistent: When participants believed the man in the images was black, they generally saw the man as larger, more threatening, and potentially more harmful in an altercation than a white person. And they were more likely to say use of force was justified against the black men than against the white men.

Other research suggests there can be superhumanization bias at work as well, with white people more likely to associate paranormal or magical powers with black people than with other white people. And the more they associate magical powers with black people, the less likely they are to believe black people feel pain.

Another study found people tend to associate what the authors call “black-sounding names,” like DeShawn and Jamal, with larger, more violent people than they do “white-sounding names,” like Connor and Garrett.

“I’ve never been so disgusted by my own data,” Colin Holbrook, the lead author of the study, said in a statement. “The amount that our study participants assumed based only on a name was remarkable. A character with a black-sounding name was assumed to be physically larger, more prone to aggression, and lower in status than a character with a white-sounding name.”

This is just a small sampling of the research, which has consistently found evidence of racial bias.

These issues came up after Zimmerman shot and killed Martin: Why did Zimmerman see Martin as a potential threat to begin with, and follow the boy? Did racial bias influence Zimmerman’s judgment? And does the law — and those who carry out the law — give preferential treatment to the use of deadly force against black people?

After Drejka shot and killed McGlockton, America is again dealing with these questions.