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Abstract
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In 2005, the Florida state legislature started what would quickly become a trend in state firearm-related legislation, enacting a law that extended the so-called castle doctrine's right to self-defense in a person's home to any "place where he or she has a right to be."1 Effectively, this meant that in almost any location, a person could use deadly force, such as a firearm, as a first resort for self-defense without any duty to retreat if they perceived a danger of great bodily harm. This law, which was crafted by former National Rifle Association president Marion Hammer,2 was then promoted by the National Rifle Association through the American Legislative Exchange Council,3 and by 2008, 16 states had adopted what became known as stand-your-ground (SYG) laws.3 By the start of 2022, 30 states had enacted such laws.4
SYG laws gained national attention in 2012 following the fatal shooting of Trayvon Martin, an unarmed Black teenager who was returning from a convenience store and was confronted by George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watch coordinator in a gated community. Zimmerman successfully used Florida's SYG statute to escape prosecution under Florida law, sparking national protests and raising the question of whether SYG laws may lead to an increase in firearm homicide. Since that time, there have been a number of studies designed to determine whether SYG laws are associated with firearm homicide rates, but as of the most recent systematic review,5 published in 2021, the evidence was conflicting, with several national studies suggesting no or only a small association with homicide rates and a few state-specific studies (particularly in Florida) finding substantial increases in firearm homicide associated with enactment of the SYG law.
In a new analysis, Esposti et al6 add substantial clarity to the evidence regarding the outcomes of SYG laws. These insights stem from their use of a novel method to examine the association between SYG laws and firearm violence. To my knowledge, theirs is the first study to conduct separate interrupted time series analyses for all of the SYG states, allowing them to examine potential between-state heterogeneity in the observed outcomes of SYG laws. In fact, they do find substantial heterogeneity in the observed associations...
Language: en |