Last week, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) published an article entitled, “Six Words Every Killer Should Know: ‘I Feared for My Life, Officer.” Using a mis-mash of half-baked statistics, legal misinformation, and cherry-picked anecdotes, it tried to make a case that there is just too much darned self-defense going on in America.
There is certainly no shortage of homicide to report on in America, so it is telling that the WSJ chose to focus on the legally justifiable variety. This fits with the common media view that desert and intent are irrelevant when it comes to how people use firearms and that every gun-involved death demands the same response: fewer guns and fewer rights attached to their use.
As for half-baked statistics, the article suggested that states with certain types of permissive self-defense laws – what it referred to as “stand-your-ground” (SYG) – experienced disproportionate increases in justified killings over states that do not have such laws. “Justifiable homicides by civilians increased 59% from 2019 through 2024 in a large sample of cities and counties in those states, the Journal found, compared with a 16% rise in total homicides for the same locales,” the authors reported. The data on justified homicides came from “the FBI’s National Incident Based Reporting System, a modernized crime-reporting system known as NIBRS.”
The article’s statical reporting was so vague and muddied, however, that it failed to achieve anything resembling a comprehensible point. Clearly, the authors wanted readers to believe SYG laws cause increases in justifiable homicides. Assuming, for the moment, that’s even a bad thing, they did not convincingly make that case.
For one thing, it’s not clear why the six-year period of 2019 through 2024 should have been especially enlightening when it comes to judging how SYG supposedly affects homicides. The article doesn’t make any claims about when the laws were enacted or if they all were enacted at the same time (hint, they were not). For all anyone would know from reading the article, justified homicides could have been on a downward trend in some or all of the SYG jurisdictions in the years immediately after their laws’ enactments, only to have another factor occurring in that six-year span that affected their rates.
On that point, the article did not discuss or attempt to rule out any other explanation for the supposed correlation. For example, the authors did not discuss the historic spike in homicide and violent crime that occurred in tandem with the COVID-19 pandemic and the government’s official responses (which including letting convicts out of prisons and jails), as well as with rioting and disorder accompanying protests over the death of George Floyd (which was attended by less proactive policing).
Also, although the laws in question apply statewide, the article only refers to increases “in a large sample of cities and counties in those states.” It does not specify how large a sample, however, or why they didn’t just use state-level data, since the effect would presumably be uniform statewide if it were solely attributable to the state laws themselves.
On the sampling point, the article also noted that the NIBRS data it used was incomplete. First, it acknowledged that the true number of justified homicides is higher than what is reflected by NIBRS. Second, it admitted “NIBRS only covered about half the country in 2019, and even by 2024, police agencies that cover large portions of California, Pennsylvania, Florida and a handful of other states weren’t reporting through the system.” Pennsylvania and Florida, according to the article’s own data, are both SYG jurisdictions, Florida famously so (or, in the WSJ authors’ likely opinion, infamously so). Including these two populous (Florida is third highest in the nation; Pennsylvania fifth) SYG jurisdictions could well have changed the analysis.
Also, considering how the article variously describes SYG (more on that below), it’s count of which states do and do not have the law (which it attributes to research by the Rand Corporation) cannot be taken at face value nor can it be assumed all such laws are the same (hint, they are not).
In summary, there was nothing interesting or compelling, much less conclusive, in the statistics the article presented.
Second, the article presented a shifting, inaccurate, and skewed explanation of what SYG actually means.
Based on the first two sentences of the article, it would appear it means that talismanic words or phrases prevent police from delivering justice against cold-blooded killers: “It’s easier than ever to kill someone in America and get away with it,” the authors emoted. “In 30 states, it often requires only a claim you killed while protecting yourself or others.”
That is obviously not true, and the WSJ’s authors presumably know that. Homicides (the killing of one person by another) are investigated by the police. They are ALWAYS presumptively illegal. A person’s purported justification or reason for committing the act is simply one factor (or clue) among many that the police will use to determine how to proceed.
Another way the authors describe SYG is by suggesting that it “extended” a right of self-defense that was formerly limited to the home into public spaces.
That, too, is untrue. Self-defense, including lethal self-defense, has always been available in America wherever a person was legally present, whether that was a private or public place. That is one of the reasons the U.S. Supreme Court, in 2022, affirmed that the right to “bear arms” includes a right to carry a handgun in public for self-defense, a conclusion that was based on U.S. legal history and tradition. And some states have had SYG since the founding times.
Almost halfway through the article, the authors finally provide an accurate, if overly-simplistic, legal explanation:
Under stand-your-ground laws, a person no longer had the duty to retreat in any place they were legally allowed to be. They could defend themselves and others with lethal force if they reasonably thought they were in danger of death or serious harm.
This explanation properly focuses on the question of “duty to retreat.” Removing the question of retreat from the calculus of whether a person acted justifiably is the essence of SYG.
This policy serves at least two important considerations. First, it puts the law on the side of persons acting in self-defense. They can choose the course of action they consider the safest for themselves or another innocent person under the circumstances. Second, it prevents a paradigm in which criminal aggressors get to decide who goes where in public places, confident that no one can resist them with force unless cornered with no place to go.
What the article fails to mention, however, is the significance of the term “reasonably” before “thought.” A finding of justified self-defense requires the defender to have – not just a subjective, good-faith belief in the presence of imminent lethal danger and the necessity of using deadly force in response – but a determination that belief was objectively reasonable. That is, a determination a reasonable person in the same circumstances could have drawn the same conclusion. This is a question for the police and prosecution to resolve in the first instance. If the matter goes to trial, it is ultimately a question for the judge or jury. Contrary to the WSJ’s characterizations, the defender’s own asserted state of mind is not the first and last word in any homicide investigation.
Finally, in illustrating the “problem” supposedly posed by the SYG laws, the article mentioned a handful of anecdotes that featured aggressors who were all armed; who in at least one case was known to have a violent history and who was accused of trespassing on the victim’s property; who in two cases were found to have illegal drugs in their systems; and who in another case was involved in an apparent domestic disturbance in a public place. The justified defenders included a retired a police officer; a 78-year-old man who was 36 years older than the man he shot in self-defense (who reportedly refused to leave the defender’s property when told to do so, instead approaching him with a chainsaw); and a woman who had just seen her husband shot in a parking lot.
While the article’s point seemed to be that the confrontations could have been avoidable with more discretion on the defenders’ parts, all of them culminated in circumstances where self-defense was plausibly reasonable. And to the degree the defenders didn’t just “mind their own business,” they were intervening in behavior that included alleged trespass and armed assault. Moreover, a typical (if not universal) feature of SYG laws (and self-defense laws in general) is that they do not apply to one who provokes the confrontation which gives rise to the need for defensive force. Who the aggressor was in a given confrontation is, again, a question of fact for the police and prosecution to decide in the first instance. In a public place, they will often have witnesses and surveillance camera footage to aid in this determination.
In any event, it is impossible to know from the article whether these incidents were typical of the others in the sample the authors used in compiling their data. It is possible, and probable, that they were chosen specifically to paint SYG in what the authors considered its worst light. And it’s also possible there were other examples that would tend to increase public’s confidence in and support of SYG that the WSJ authors intentionally omitted.
Gun control advocates who insist they take no issue with the Second Amendment and only want “commonsense gun safety measures” often can’t help betraying their true desire to see gun ownership severely curtailed or eliminated entirely. Less commonly, however, do they take a straight run at the ancient principle of defensive force itself. While this latest attempt to do just that in the WSJ was ultimately amateurish and unconvincing, it’s still worth paying attention to for what it says about the true feelings and goals of those who oppose gun ownership in America.
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