Stand Your Ground laws are controversial, but only because the people pushing them want folks to believe it means something it doesn't. The only difference between states with the law and those without it comes down to whether you're required to try to retreat from a life-or-death situation before engaging in lethal force in self-defense.
The issue with duty to retreat laws is that it doesn't take much for a hungry prosecutor to decide that the window six feet up that was slightly open was an avenue of escape and prosecute you for failing to use it. While you might win in such an egregious case, it's bound to be expensive and will completely ruin you financially.
And yeah, the anti-Second Amendment forces have been spinning their tales about it's really a license to kill. That appeared in the pages of none other than the Wall Street Journal, which is usually a bit better than that.
Over at America's 1st Freedom, though, editor-in-chief Frank Miniter opted to fire back at the hatchet job "reporting."
The newspaper’s newsroom is another matter; indeed, the differences between the two has gone public. In July 2020, more than 280 Wall Street Journal newsroom employees (reporters, editors and others) signed a public letter criticizing the Opinion page.
At the time, the Opinion board responded with a note to readers saying they wouldn’t yield to “cancel-culture pressure.”
I note this, not to take sides—there is still a lot worth reading, in my opinion, in much of this storied newspaper—but instead to ask why the Journal—we might expect this from The New York Times—has recently run two “news” pieces (here and here) that are carefully written to make people think armed citizens somehow have licenses to murder and that Stand Your Ground laws give them this power over life and death.
The first, which ran on October 28, was titled “Six Words Every Killer Should Know: ‘I Feared for My Life, Officer.’” This article claimed that “it’s easier than ever to kill someone in America and get away with it,” because of Stand Your Ground laws.
The paper claimed that justifiable homicides by civilians increased by 59% from 2019 through 2024 in a “large sample of cities and counties” in 30 states that have Stand Your Ground statutes.
First, the fact that citizens have the right and the means to defend their lives and their loved ones is not a bad thing.
If this right—with rights come great responsibilities—is being misused, then honest reporting should bring this out, but that is not what the carefully mined data is showing here.
The data on justified homicides they used came from “the FBI’s National Incident Based Reporting System, a modernized crime-reporting system known as NIBRS.”
For some reason, the reporters here used data from the six-year period of 2019 through 2024. Why? The article doesn’t make any claims about when the Stand Your Ground laws were enacted or if they all were enacted, in say, 2018 or 2019 (they were not).
Of course, we've long argued here about how terrible so-called gun violence research actually is. To call it terrible is really an understatement, if we're being honest. Since Bearing Arms tries to be family-friendly, I can't use the appropriate language to describe how bad the research actually is. It's not even research. It's activism given the trappings of unbiased findings...unless you look into it, then not even the trappings are really there.
Honestly, I don't care if justifiable homicides are up. Let them triple or quadruple, for all I care. If bad people trying to hurt good people end up in a bag at the morgue, it's not exactly something I'm going to lose sleep over.
The Journal has usually been above such things, but now it's not, and it's hard not to be bothered by that. Not because I think they owe me something, but because I simply thought they really were better than that.
So yeah, they cherry-picked data to make it look bad, spun it so that it looks particularly awful, then sold it to the American public as if it actually meant something. Unfortunately, most people don't understand how the research process works well enough to raise these questions. That's probably not an oversight on the education establishment's part, if I'm being frank. People who don't know what they're looking at are far more likely to believe what they're told than those who can examine the data critically.
For America's 1st Freedom, this was an opportunity to debunk it, and they did.
The issue is that the people who most need to see it aren't going to. They'll keep their heads in the hole and believe what the media tells us, and think this is especially true since the Wall Street Journal said it!
Editor's Note: Second Amendment advocates are doing everything they can to protect our Second Amendment rights and right to self-defense.
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