Do ‘Stand Your Ground’ Laws produce more gun homicides?

Do ‘Stand Your Ground’ Laws produce more gun homicides?

Paul Waldman — Read time: 4 minutes

Many people in other countries believe that the entirety of America is a kind of modern-day Tombstone (or at least the Hollywood version of that frontier town), where everyone is armed, shots ring out at all hours and arguments are settled with an exchange of gunfire.

It can be hard to argue against that view, exaggerated though it may be, when our rate of gun homicide is so much higher than any other comparable country and by some estimates there are well over 400 million guns in circulation in the United States.

But it’s not just the number of guns Americans have or the rate at which we kill each other that leave people elsewhere shaking their heads. It’s also the laws that make it possible.

Which is why a new study on the consequences of “stand your ground” laws is of particular import, since these laws have become so popular in Republican-run states in recent years.

These laws vary somewhat from state to state. But in essence they make it easier for people to claim self-defense after they’ve killed someone, often by removing the “duty to retreat,” which says that if you can leave a potentially violent confrontation rather than escalate it, you must.

The very name of these laws was crafted by their proponents to evoke principle and courage, to argue without quite saying so is that what real men do when threatened is, they stand their ground and shoot.

By analyzing states that did and did not pass such laws between 2000 and 2016, the authors of the study, a group of U.S. and British public health researchers, attempted to isolate the effects of stand-your-ground laws on homicide rates.

They found that these laws were associated with an 8 percent increase in firearm homicide. I was particularly interested in this result:

Large increases for homicide and firearm homicide rates were associated with the enactment of SYG laws in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Missouri. These increases ranged from 16.2% to 33.5%, with firearm homicides typically showing larger increases than total homicides. SYG laws were not significantly associated with changes in homicides or firearm homicides rates in a handful of states, including Arizona, Indiana, Michigan, Nevada, Oklahoma, Texas, and West Virginia.

While every state is a little different, the largest increases happened in the South. If you know the relevant history, that isn’t surprising.

It isn’t just that the South has often had higher rates of violent crime than most other regions. It’s also about a particular explanation of why that might be so, one that relates directly to “stand your ground.”

For some time, psychologists and sociologists have hypothesized that the “culture of honor” particularly prevalent among White Southerners could account for higher rates of violence there. That culture is vigilant about slights, sensitive to any perceived threat to masculinity, and willing to respond to such threats with violence.

This has even been demonstrated in experiments. In one oft-cited study, researchers had someone bump into unwitting subjects in a hallway and then insult them. Those raised in the South were more upset, felt a greater threat to their masculinity and were more primed to take aggressive action in response.

There’s some debate about what the roots of such a culture might be — common explanations involve the culture of the Scotch-Irish immigrants who settled the region, and threats to livelihood involved in certain kinds of agriculture — as well as debate on how much the culture of honor might matter in contemporary society.

What isn’t in doubt, however, is that stand-your-ground laws are explicitly intended to make it easier for people to face no legal consequence, in situations where arguments become fatal due to the presence of a gun. And that’s an idea, you could argue, that is encouraged by all of American culture.

You don’t have to listen to the National Rifle Association’s assertion that “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun,” all you have to do is watch a movie or a television show. American culture is saturated with the idea that shooting people is the very essence of what makes a “good guy.”

How do you know a movie has action in it? Because the poster shows the hero with a gun. By the time you’re an adult you’ve watched a good guy with a gun kill a bad guy with a gun thousands of times.

Despite the fact that it’s a vanishingly rare occurrence in real life, and despite the fact that we suffer levels of gun violence unique in the industrialized world, gun advocates remain wedded to the idea that the solution to gun violence is more guns. Put them in more people’s hands, allow them in more places, remove restrictions and requirements on ownership and use, and lessen the legal consequences for people who shoot other people. This, they insist, will make us all safer.

Empirical evidence and the barest shred of common sense show that isn’t true. Yet the number of people who subscribe to these views, and the extraordinary power they hold, means we must constantly grapple with ideas that in most of the world are considered utterly bonkers.

We’re going to have to keep doing it, because Republicans at the state and national levels are eager to pass more and more laws to loosen restrictions on guns. And we don’t have to guess what the result will be.