SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
Mark McCloskey, center left, a Republican candidate for U.S. Senate in Missouri who first garnered attention in June 2020 after pointing guns at Black Lives Matter protesters outside his house in a gated community in St. Louis, poses with supporters of Kyle Rittenhouse and his wife Patricia McCloskey in front of the Kenosha County Courthouse while the jury deliberates the Rittenhouse trial on November 16, 2021 in Kenosha, Wisconsin. (Photo: Nathan Howard/Getty Images)
'Stand Your Ground' Laws Linked to 11% Spike in US Gun Homicides: Study
Researchers say the state-level laws "should be reconsidered to prevent unnecessary violent deaths."
Feb 21, 2022
So-called "stand your ground" laws are associated with hundreds of additional homicides each year in the United States, according to new research conducted by public health scholars, who say that these laws "should be reconsidered to prevent unnecessary violent deaths."
The enactment of SYG laws contributed to an especially pronounced rise in firearm homicide rates in many Southern states that were quick to adopt the laws.
Published Monday in JAMA Network Open, a peer-reviewed medical journal, the study compares homicide trends in roughly two dozen states that enacted stand-your-ground (SYG) laws between 2000 and 2016 with patterns from 18 states that didn't have such laws during the study period.
Researchers found that SYG laws were associated with an "abrupt and sustained" 8% to 11% national increase in monthly firearm homicide rates, causing an extra 58 to 72 deaths per month. "This monthly increase alone exceeds total rates of homicides in most Northern and Western European countries today," wrote the authors.
The enactment of SYG laws contributed to an especially pronounced rise in firearm homicide rates in many Southern states that were quick to adopt the laws, with upticks ranging from 16.2% to 33.5% in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Missouri.
However, SYG laws were not associated with significant changes in firearm homicide rates in Arizona, Indiana, Michigan, Nevada, Oklahoma, Texas, and West Virginia.
Researchers acknowledged that "SYG laws alone may not be sufficient in explaining increases in homicide."
"Understanding the factors shaping these differential associations between states, such as regions endorsing the use of self-protective violence, existing state firearm legislation, and firearm availability, is key to understanding how and why legally expanding the right to use deadly violence in public is associated with increases in homicides in some states but not others," they continued.
According to the study:
"Stand your ground" (SYG) laws, also known as shoot first laws, overwrite the common law principle of a "duty to retreat," creating the possibility for individuals to use deadly force in self-defense in public as a first, rather than last, resort. Florida was the first state to enact an SYG law by statute in 2005, and then 23 states enacted SYG laws soon after, between 2006 and 2008.
Advocates claim that SYG laws enhance public safety by deterring predatory crime through an increased threat of retaliatory violence. Critics, on the other hand, argue that the laws are unnecessary, and may threaten public safety by emboldening the use of deadly violence in public encounters in which violence and injury that could have safely been avoided. There are also concerns that the laws exacerbate social inequalities in experiencing violent crime, since implicit and explicit biases of threat perception discriminate against and cause disproportionate harms among minority groups, such as Black people. Anecdotally, critics' concerns have been realized in an increasing number of shootings of young Black men (e.g., Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, and Markeis McGlockton) where self-defense has been claimed. These high-profile incidents underline the controversy surrounding SYG laws and have served to galvanize the Black Lives Matter movement.
David Humphreys, an associate professor at the University of Oxford and one of the paper's authors, told the Washington Post that proponents of SYG laws argue that they have "some protective effect on public safety and deterring violence."
"There doesn't seem to be any evidence to show that and, you know, we only seem to see the opposite effect," he added.
The paper states that even though "the enactment of SYG laws was not associated with significant change in violent deaths in all states, there was no evidence that SYG laws were associated with decreases in homicide or firearm homicide."
"The accumulation of evidence established in this and other studies point to harmful outcomes associated with SYG laws," researchers pointed out. "Despite this, SYG laws have now been enacted in most states, and the uptake of new SYG bills continues to be popular, unnecessarily risking lives."
"Although the uptake was initially concentrated in the South, by 2021, 30 states had enacted SYG laws, and this number continues to increase as a raft of ongoing bills make their way through state legislatures," noted the authors. "Fourteen states currently having SYG bills under active consideration."
An Urgent Message From Our Co-Founder
Dear Common Dreams reader, It’s been nearly 30 years since I co-founded Common Dreams with my late wife, Lina Newhouser. We had the radical notion that journalism should serve the public good, not corporate profits. It was clear to us from the outset what it would take to build such a project. No paid advertisements. No corporate sponsors. No millionaire publisher telling us what to think or do. Many people said we wouldn't last a year, but we proved those doubters wrong. Together with a tremendous team of journalists and dedicated staff, we built an independent media outlet free from the constraints of profits and corporate control. Our mission has always been simple: To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good. Building Common Dreams was not easy. Our survival was never guaranteed. When you take on the most powerful forces—Wall Street greed, fossil fuel industry destruction, Big Tech lobbyists, and uber-rich oligarchs who have spent billions upon billions rigging the economy and democracy in their favor—the only bulwark you have is supporters who believe in your work. But here’s the urgent message from me today. It's never been this bad out there. And it's never been this hard to keep us going. At the very moment Common Dreams is most needed, the threats we face are intensifying. We need your support now more than ever. We don't accept corporate advertising and never will. We don't have a paywall because we don't think people should be blocked from critical news based on their ability to pay. Everything we do is funded by the donations of readers like you. When everyone does the little they can afford, we are strong. But if that support retreats or dries up, so do we. Will you donate now to make sure Common Dreams not only survives but thrives? —Craig Brown, Co-founder |
Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.
Kenny Stancil
Kenny Stancil is senior researcher at the Revolving Door Project and a former staff writer for Common Dreams.
So-called "stand your ground" laws are associated with hundreds of additional homicides each year in the United States, according to new research conducted by public health scholars, who say that these laws "should be reconsidered to prevent unnecessary violent deaths."
The enactment of SYG laws contributed to an especially pronounced rise in firearm homicide rates in many Southern states that were quick to adopt the laws.
Published Monday in JAMA Network Open, a peer-reviewed medical journal, the study compares homicide trends in roughly two dozen states that enacted stand-your-ground (SYG) laws between 2000 and 2016 with patterns from 18 states that didn't have such laws during the study period.
Researchers found that SYG laws were associated with an "abrupt and sustained" 8% to 11% national increase in monthly firearm homicide rates, causing an extra 58 to 72 deaths per month. "This monthly increase alone exceeds total rates of homicides in most Northern and Western European countries today," wrote the authors.
The enactment of SYG laws contributed to an especially pronounced rise in firearm homicide rates in many Southern states that were quick to adopt the laws, with upticks ranging from 16.2% to 33.5% in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Missouri.
However, SYG laws were not associated with significant changes in firearm homicide rates in Arizona, Indiana, Michigan, Nevada, Oklahoma, Texas, and West Virginia.
Researchers acknowledged that "SYG laws alone may not be sufficient in explaining increases in homicide."
"Understanding the factors shaping these differential associations between states, such as regions endorsing the use of self-protective violence, existing state firearm legislation, and firearm availability, is key to understanding how and why legally expanding the right to use deadly violence in public is associated with increases in homicides in some states but not others," they continued.
According to the study:
"Stand your ground" (SYG) laws, also known as shoot first laws, overwrite the common law principle of a "duty to retreat," creating the possibility for individuals to use deadly force in self-defense in public as a first, rather than last, resort. Florida was the first state to enact an SYG law by statute in 2005, and then 23 states enacted SYG laws soon after, between 2006 and 2008.
Advocates claim that SYG laws enhance public safety by deterring predatory crime through an increased threat of retaliatory violence. Critics, on the other hand, argue that the laws are unnecessary, and may threaten public safety by emboldening the use of deadly violence in public encounters in which violence and injury that could have safely been avoided. There are also concerns that the laws exacerbate social inequalities in experiencing violent crime, since implicit and explicit biases of threat perception discriminate against and cause disproportionate harms among minority groups, such as Black people. Anecdotally, critics' concerns have been realized in an increasing number of shootings of young Black men (e.g., Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, and Markeis McGlockton) where self-defense has been claimed. These high-profile incidents underline the controversy surrounding SYG laws and have served to galvanize the Black Lives Matter movement.
David Humphreys, an associate professor at the University of Oxford and one of the paper's authors, told the Washington Post that proponents of SYG laws argue that they have "some protective effect on public safety and deterring violence."
"There doesn't seem to be any evidence to show that and, you know, we only seem to see the opposite effect," he added.
The paper states that even though "the enactment of SYG laws was not associated with significant change in violent deaths in all states, there was no evidence that SYG laws were associated with decreases in homicide or firearm homicide."
"The accumulation of evidence established in this and other studies point to harmful outcomes associated with SYG laws," researchers pointed out. "Despite this, SYG laws have now been enacted in most states, and the uptake of new SYG bills continues to be popular, unnecessarily risking lives."
"Although the uptake was initially concentrated in the South, by 2021, 30 states had enacted SYG laws, and this number continues to increase as a raft of ongoing bills make their way through state legislatures," noted the authors. "Fourteen states currently having SYG bills under active consideration."
Kenny Stancil
Kenny Stancil is senior researcher at the Revolving Door Project and a former staff writer for Common Dreams.
So-called "stand your ground" laws are associated with hundreds of additional homicides each year in the United States, according to new research conducted by public health scholars, who say that these laws "should be reconsidered to prevent unnecessary violent deaths."
The enactment of SYG laws contributed to an especially pronounced rise in firearm homicide rates in many Southern states that were quick to adopt the laws.
Published Monday in JAMA Network Open, a peer-reviewed medical journal, the study compares homicide trends in roughly two dozen states that enacted stand-your-ground (SYG) laws between 2000 and 2016 with patterns from 18 states that didn't have such laws during the study period.
Researchers found that SYG laws were associated with an "abrupt and sustained" 8% to 11% national increase in monthly firearm homicide rates, causing an extra 58 to 72 deaths per month. "This monthly increase alone exceeds total rates of homicides in most Northern and Western European countries today," wrote the authors.
The enactment of SYG laws contributed to an especially pronounced rise in firearm homicide rates in many Southern states that were quick to adopt the laws, with upticks ranging from 16.2% to 33.5% in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, and Missouri.
However, SYG laws were not associated with significant changes in firearm homicide rates in Arizona, Indiana, Michigan, Nevada, Oklahoma, Texas, and West Virginia.
Researchers acknowledged that "SYG laws alone may not be sufficient in explaining increases in homicide."
"Understanding the factors shaping these differential associations between states, such as regions endorsing the use of self-protective violence, existing state firearm legislation, and firearm availability, is key to understanding how and why legally expanding the right to use deadly violence in public is associated with increases in homicides in some states but not others," they continued.
According to the study:
"Stand your ground" (SYG) laws, also known as shoot first laws, overwrite the common law principle of a "duty to retreat," creating the possibility for individuals to use deadly force in self-defense in public as a first, rather than last, resort. Florida was the first state to enact an SYG law by statute in 2005, and then 23 states enacted SYG laws soon after, between 2006 and 2008.
Advocates claim that SYG laws enhance public safety by deterring predatory crime through an increased threat of retaliatory violence. Critics, on the other hand, argue that the laws are unnecessary, and may threaten public safety by emboldening the use of deadly violence in public encounters in which violence and injury that could have safely been avoided. There are also concerns that the laws exacerbate social inequalities in experiencing violent crime, since implicit and explicit biases of threat perception discriminate against and cause disproportionate harms among minority groups, such as Black people. Anecdotally, critics' concerns have been realized in an increasing number of shootings of young Black men (e.g., Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, and Markeis McGlockton) where self-defense has been claimed. These high-profile incidents underline the controversy surrounding SYG laws and have served to galvanize the Black Lives Matter movement.
David Humphreys, an associate professor at the University of Oxford and one of the paper's authors, told the Washington Post that proponents of SYG laws argue that they have "some protective effect on public safety and deterring violence."
"There doesn't seem to be any evidence to show that and, you know, we only seem to see the opposite effect," he added.
The paper states that even though "the enactment of SYG laws was not associated with significant change in violent deaths in all states, there was no evidence that SYG laws were associated with decreases in homicide or firearm homicide."
"The accumulation of evidence established in this and other studies point to harmful outcomes associated with SYG laws," researchers pointed out. "Despite this, SYG laws have now been enacted in most states, and the uptake of new SYG bills continues to be popular, unnecessarily risking lives."
"Although the uptake was initially concentrated in the South, by 2021, 30 states had enacted SYG laws, and this number continues to increase as a raft of ongoing bills make their way through state legislatures," noted the authors. "Fourteen states currently having SYG bills under active consideration."
We've had enough. The 1% own and operate the corporate media. They are doing everything they can to defend the status quo, squash dissent and protect the wealthy and the powerful. The Common Dreams media model is different. We cover the news that matters to the 99%. Our mission? To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good. How? Nonprofit. Independent. Reader-supported. Free to read. Free to republish. Free to share. With no advertising. No paywalls. No selling of your data. Thousands of small donations fund our newsroom and allow us to continue publishing. Can you chip in? We can't do it without you. Thank you.