"Stand Your Ground" Laws A Deadly Illusion

(Cartoon above is by Scott Stantis in the Chicago Tribune.)

It is a sad fact of government that laws don't always work as they were intended to work. Sometimes they turn out to actually make a problem worse rather than better.

It is a well known fact of life in the United States that we have more gun deaths than any other developed country in the world. We also have more guns floating around in our society than any other country -- nearly one gun for every person in the country (over 300 million guns for a population of about 315 million people). And the NRA (and many other gun lovers) tell us that the solution to the large number of gun deaths (and crime in general) is for more people to carry guns in more places. There have even been efforts to legalize the carrying of concealed weapons in schools, colleges, bars, churches, businesses, workplaces, and even state legislatures (Texas has made this legal).

But one of the most popular efforts of gun lovers has been to rewrite the state laws on "self-defense". It has always been an aspect of our law that, except in a person's own home, a person has a duty to withdraw or retreat rather than hurt someone else that is threatening them. Self defense is only considered a viable defense for taking violent action if there was no avenue for retreat and the person felt their life was in danger. But many states have re-written those "castle doctrine" laws into "stand your ground" laws. These remove the requirement to retreat if threatened, and give the threatened person the right to use violence (including gun violence) simply because they could claim they were threatened.

It was claimed these new "stand your ground" laws would reduce crime, especially violent crime, since a criminal could never know if the person they were threatening might have a gun or not. This sounded reasonable to a lot of legislators, and at least 21 states have now adopted these laws. But have those laws really worked to accomplish their stated purpose? Have they deterred crime, and saved lives? Sadly, the answer is NO.

That is the conclusion reached in a new study of "stand your ground" laws by a couple of researchers at Texas A&M University. In a report released on December 17th of 2012, Mark Hoekstra and Cheng Cheng (both professors in A&M's department of Economics) found that the "stand your ground" laws and enhanced "castle doctrine" laws have not worked as they were intended. After studying statistics in the states that have adopted those laws, they found that the laws did not deter crime, and have actually had a negative effect -- by increasing murders in those states by a statistically significant 8% (or about 600 more murders in those states than before).

Here is how the researchers put their findings in their conclusion:

Results presented indicate that castle doctrine law does not deter crime. Furthermore, our estimates are sufficiently precise as to rule out moderate-sized deterrence effects. Thus, while our view is that it is a priori reasonable to expect that strengthening self-defense law would deter crime, we find this is not the case.

More significantly, results indicate that castle doctrine laws increase total homicides by around 8 percent. Put differently, the laws induce an additional 600 homicides per year across the 21 states in our sample that enacted castle doctrine laws.

It is time to rethink these laws. They may have been passed with good intentions (to deter crime and save lives), but they have not achieved their designed purpose. In fact, they have had the opposite effect. I don't know why these laws have failed. It might be because untrained gun owners react improperly under stress. It might be because criminals shoot more people thinking they are protecting themselves. It might be that the laws allow people to more easily act on their prejudices and irrational fears. But it doesn't really matter. The point is the laws aren't working, and they need to be changed.