Guns And Society
8:00 am
Thu January 3, 2013

'Stand Your Ground' Linked To Increase In Homicides In Florida


NPR's Shankar Vedantam's report on stand your ground laws and the rise in homicide they may have caused.



Now, researchers who've studied the effect of the laws have found that states with a stand your ground law have more homicides than states without such laws.

COMPARING STATES: This chart, based on data provided by Texas A&amp;M researcher Mark Hoekstra, compares homicide rates in states that have stand your ground laws with homicide trends in states that don't have the laws. The vertical y-axis represents an adjusted homicide rate that takes into account a state's population, pre-existing crime trends and other factors.


Defending The Law

Advocates for the laws, like Republican state Rep. Dennis Baxley, who sponsored Florida's version, says such legislation allows good people to defend themselves.

"They're doing what they are supposed to do, as a good citizen," he says. "They're stopping a violent act. And that's what I want the statute to do at the end of the day."

Marion Hammer, a former president of the National Rifle Association, said the laws have been effective and are working exactly as designed. A committee analyzing the Florida statute has found no increase in violence as a result of the law.

Because murder is a rare phenomenon, the numbers in any given state can be hard to analyze. It can be difficult, for example, to disentangle the effects of stand your ground statutes from other trends, such as natural fluctuations in the crime rate. Until now, there has been little attempt to rigorously study these laws at a national level.Hoekstra recently decided to analyze national crime statistics to see what happens in states that pass stand your ground laws. He found the laws are having a measurable effect on the homicide rate.

"Our study finds that, that homicides go up by 7 to 9 percent in states that pass the laws, relative to states that didn't pass the laws over the same time period," he says.

The Deterrence Question

As to whether the laws reduce crime — by creating a deterrence for criminals — he says, "we find no evidence of any deterrence effect over that same time period."

Hoekstra obtained this result by comparing the homicide rate in states before and after they passed the laws. He also compared states with the laws to states without the laws.

"We find that there are 500 to 700 more homicides per year across the 23 states as a result of the laws," he said. There are about 14,000 homicides annually in the United States as a whole.

The fact that more people are being killed doesn't automatically mean the law isn't working. Hoekstra says there are at least three possible explanations.

"It could be that these are self-defense killings," he said. "On the other hand, the increase could be driven by an escalation of violence by criminals. Or it could be an escalation of violence in otherwise nonviolent situations."

But which is it?

Finding The Cause

Hoekstra checked to see whether police were listing more cases as "justifiable homicides" in states that passed stand your ground laws. If there were more self-defense killings, this number should have gone up. He also examined whether more criminals were showing up armed.

In both cases, he found nothing. There were small increases in both numbers, but it was hard to tell whether there was really any difference.

So if the numbers on justifiable homicide and criminals using lethal force don't explain the rise in homicide, what's causing the increase?

"One possibility for the increase in homicide is that perhaps [in cases where] there would have been a fistfight ... now, because of stand your ground laws, it's possible that those escalate into something much more violent and lethal," says Hoekstra.

It's important to remember that the data Hoekstra is analyzing depend on how police classify shootings. Police guidelines likely vary from state to state, and police in different places may be interpreting shootings differently in light of stand your ground laws.

The Bad Guy Is...?



That study also tracked the increased homicides by race. In contrast to the narrative established by the Trayvon Martin shooting — many people believe black men are more likely to be the victims of stand your ground laws — this analysis found the additional deaths caused by the laws were largely concentrated among white men.

The NRA, which has backed these laws, referred a request for comment to Howard Nemerov, a gun-rights activist who often represents the NRA viewpoint on television. Nemerov offered a technical analysis, which has not been reviewed by academic experts, in which he said concerns about the law were flawed.

Confirming Research

Stanford law professor John Donohue, on the other hand, praised the study done by Texas A&M's Hoekstra. Donohue has been studying crime and violence for more than two decades and is working on his own independent analysis of stand your ground laws. So far, he says, he's getting the same results Hoekstra did.


