Right wing makes everyone less safe

It’s easier than ever to kill someone in America and get away with it. 

In 30 states, it often requires only a claim you killed while protecting yourself or others. 

While Americans have long been free to use deadly force to defend themselves at home, so-called stand-your-ground laws in those 30 states extend legal protections to public places and make it difficult for prosecutors to file homicide charges against anyone who says they killed in self-defense.

The number of legally sanctioned homicides by civilians in the 30 stand-your-ground states has risen substantially in recent years, The Wall Street Journal found in an analysis of data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

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.

With more guns in more hands, families are grieving loved ones lost to quick-tempered killings, often involving law-abiding civilians, with no one held accountable. 

In many stand-your-ground cases, authorities are left to rely on the word of survivors. The laws are written to protect those who tell authorities they feared for their life.

The Journal analysis, which examined detailed homicide reports from 3,700 police agencies in the 30 states, is the first to examine the impact of stand-your-ground laws using the FBI’s National Incident Based Reporting System, a modernized crime-reporting system known as NIBRS.

Nationwide, NIBRS data show there were at least 1,993 justifiable homicides by civilians in the six-year period studied by the Journal, including 406 in 2024. 

The true number of legally sanctioned killings is higher. 

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. In addition, not all justifiable homicides are reflected in the data, particularly those that underwent lengthy investigations and were later declared self-defense killings.

After the law passed, Florida reported an increase in justifiable homicides, excluding those by police, according to the state’s law enforcement agency. Such cases averaged 15 a year in the decade before the law. The figure reached 45 in 2009 and 77 in 2020, when Florida stopped reporting the tally.