No Retreat: The Impact of Stand Your Ground Laws on Violent Crime

• Published date: 01 December 2023
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/07340168221124453
• Author: K. Alexander Adams
• Date: 01 December 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

No Retreat: The Impact of

Stand Your Ground Laws on

Violent Crime

K. Alexander Adams

1

Abstract

Since the early 1990s, 27 states passed statutes known as “stand your ground laws”to give legal

protection to citizens who use lethal force in self-defense, and 8 states have acted as de facto

stand your ground states due to court rulings. Proponents of these laws believe they act as a crim-

inal deterrent while opponents say they legitimize vigilantism. The aim of this paper is to determine

whether there is a relationship between stand your ground laws and crime. Data from f‌ixed effects

and negative binomial regression models from 1980–2018 f‌ind no strong relationship between stand

your ground laws and crime in either direction. Policy implications are discussed, namely, the pri-

mary costs and benef‌its of these laws are not likely to stem from increases or decreases in

crime but rather the legal and ethical consequences of increasing protections for civilians who

act in self-defense.

Keywords

stand your ground, violent crime, gun control, f‌irearms, homicide

Introduction

Scholars have long debated what causes the United States’uniquely high violent crime rates. In 2018

alone, the FBI estimated there were 16,214 murders in the United States, and of those murders,

72.7% were committed with a f‌irearm (FBI, 2018). Given the propensity of American criminals to

use f‌irearms in the commission of violent crime, researchers have taken a keen interest in

America’s lax gun laws as a potential explanation for high levels of violence in the United States.

A notable example of America’s loose gun laws has been the rapid proliferation of what are

known as “stand your ground”(SYG) laws across dozens of U.S. states. SYG laws stand in contrast

to the long-held common law principle that, when faced with an assailant, an individual must retreat

before engaging in lethal force in self-defense, except when one is in their home (their “castle”). SYG

laws are statues which extend the common law “castle doctrine”to all public places where an indi-

vidual has a right to be and eliminate the traditional duty to retreat requirement. While SYG laws are

not limited to f‌irearms—they also would apply to individuals who defend themselves with any other

1

Firearms Research Center, University of Wyoming College of Law, Laramie, Wyoming, USA

Corresponding Author:

K. Alexander Adams, Firearms Research Center, University of Wyoming College of Law, Laramie, Wyoming, USA.

Email: kalexanderadams@outlook.com

Article

Criminal Justice Review

2023, Vol. 48(4) 417-436

© 2022 Georgia State University

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/07340168221124453

journals.sagepub.com/home/cjr

weapon or no weapon at all—defensive gun use in the United States, according to some surveys, is

relatively common, and most SYG cases involve the use of a f‌irearm (English, 2021; Tampa Bay

Times, 2013). SYG laws are not a carte blanche to use deadly force; defendants often demonstrate

a reasonable person would have felt threatened in their situation. In some states, such as Florida, the

burden of proof is on the prosecution, but nonetheless stand your ground laws in theory only permit

lawful use of force. Further, individuals involved in criminal activities, in most cases, cannot invoke a

SYG statute in their defense. Despite the restrictions written into SYG statutes, there have been many

high-prof‌ile instances where defendants have, according to some, gone too far.

The objective of this paper is to analyze one of the key reasons legislators across the country have

been persuaded to adopt such legislation: the alleged deterrent effect these laws have on crime. Major

gun advocacy groups, such as the NRA, have supported SYG laws under the pretense that these laws

will reduce crime and save lives (McClellan and Tekin, 2017). Likewise, state legislator Dennis

Baxley, one of the authors of Florida’s stand your ground law, has cited falling crime rates after

Florida’s SYG law was passed as proof the law saved lives (Holan, 2012). The deterrent effect of

these laws is not the only motivation behind these laws, of course. Proponents also argue these

laws are necessary to protect citizens from civil and criminal liability in self-defense cases.

Former Florida Governor Jeb Bush in a 2015 speech at an annual NRA meeting forcibly argued

that individuals “shouldn’t have to choose between being attacked and going to jail,”and said

Florida’s SYG law, which he signed in 2005, is a model for the rest of the country because it protects

“people’s rights to protect themselves”(NRA, 2015).

On the other hand, major gun control groups have consistently opposed the proliferation of SYG

legislation across the United States on the grounds that it will increase lawlessness and impinge upon

public safety efforts. The American gun control organization Everytown for Gun Safety claims these

laws promote “armed vigilantism”and “[t]hey encourage the escalation of violence in avoidable sit-

uations”(Everytown for Gun Safety, 2019). The Southern Poverty Law Center (SLPC), in a joint

report with the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, argues these laws “justify murderous

vigilantism”because these laws “remove the traditional obligation to de-escalate a confrontation and

avoid using lethal force in public by stepping away (or “retreating”) when it is safe to do so”(SPLC,

2020).

Gun rights and gun control groups are not the only groups who have been involved in the stand

your ground debate. Organizations such as the American Bar Association have released compre-

hensive reports which critique these laws on legal, ethical, racial, and criminological grounds. The

2015 Bar report commented directly on the impact of SYG laws on crime and argued that “empir-

ical evidence shows that states with statutory Stand Your Ground laws have increased homicide

rates”(American Bar Association, 2015). The American Psychological Association has the

same stance, concurring with the Bar’s judgment that these laws “result in deadly crime”

(Voelker, 2015).

There are good prima facie reasons to accept both the NRA’s deterrence hypothesis and the other

groups’aggression hypothesis, making the impact SYG laws have on violent crime are theoretically

ambiguous. On the one hand, these laws may increase rates of homicide, murder, and assault by esca-

lating what otherwise would have been a minor dispute into a deadly (or near deadly) encounter. On

the other hand, it is possible that making it easier for citizens to defend themselves would deter crim-

inals from attacking citizens who might be armed, as the risks of committing a crime increase when

citizens are able to defend themselves—also known as the deterrence hypothesis (Lott, 2010). If SYG

laws did deter crime, the deterrence effect would apply to all crimes where a perpetrator is likely to

encounter an armed victim. Because of this, it is important to study multiple violent crime categories

rather than focusing on one single metric, such as murder or homicide. By studying a large swath of

crimes, this paper is part of the long-standing literature on criminal deterrence which has arisen since

at least the 1960s (Becker, 1968; Ehrlich, 1975; Lott and Mustard, 1997).

418 Criminal Justice Review 48(4)