Perhaps the best way to defend ourselves from a bad guy with a gun is to keep the bad guy from getting a gun.

Studies: Stand Your Ground Laws Lead To More Homicides, Don't Deter Crime (Click here to read more)

By Dylan Scott  16388 views
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Homicides increase under the "castle doctrine" or Stand Your Ground laws, according to two studies published since 2012, while the laws do not appear to deter crime in any significant way.
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Researchers at Georgia State and Texas A&M universities used different methodologies and data sources to reach their conclusions, but they ended up in the same place: More people are killed after these laws are passed.
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Researchers at Texas A&M University, for a study published in the Journal of Human Resources, concluded that homicides had increased by 8 percent in the more than 20 states that had passed "castle doctrine" laws, many of which include Stand Your Ground provisions. That equals 600 additional homicides every year in those states, they wrote.
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At the same time, however, the researchers found no detectable decrease in burglary, robbery or aggravated assault.
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"Collectively, these findings suggest that incentives do matter in one important sense: lowering the threshold for the justified use of lethal force results in more of it," the authors concluded in the report. "On the other hand, there is also a limit to the power of incentives, as criminals are apparently not deterred when victims are empowered to use lethal force to protect themselves."
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As the Texas A&M researchers noted in that 2013 study, their findings aligned with those of a 2012 study published by Georgia State University on Stand Your Ground laws.