Study: Stand Your Ground Laws Increase Homicides

[Gothmog]

Texas A&M has a new study out on the effects of Stand Your Ground Laws that I tend to agree with this study (btw, in the interst of full disclosure both of my sibliings are AGGIES)http://www.burntorangereport.com/diary/12379/study-stand-your-ground-laws-are-failed-policy

The new study, from the Department of Economics at Texas A&M, comes to a devastating conclusion in its first page:

"We find no evidence of deterrence; burglary, robbery, and aggravated assault are unaffected by the laws. On the other hand, we find that murder and non-negligent manslaughter are increased by 7 to 9 percent. This could represent either increased use of lethal force in self-defense situations, or the escalation of violence in otherwise non-lethal situations. Regardless, the results indicate that a primary consequence of strengthening self-defense law is increased homicide."

I do not like stand your ground laws and hopefully the case of Zimmerman and the idiot in Houston will show these laws to be dangerous. Here is a link to the story about the Houston idiot who tried this defense http://www.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Houston-stand-your-ground-defendant-found-guilty-3630968.php

[upaloopa]

1. Sorry, that can't be. We've all been told that the new gun laws have reduced gun violence.

I've been told that the FBI says so.

[SGMRTDARMY]

8. Nobody has said that

All we've said is that more guns don't=more crime. Violent crimes rates are at a 30 year low while firearm ownership is at a historic high. There are several reasons for this trend and it ain't because of more guns. A few reasons are better policing, the graying of the baby boomer generation, but no one that I have seen has claimed its because of more guns.
If you have a link to your accusation, provide it.

[DanTex]

9. Actually, more guns do equal more crime.

More homicide, to be precise...

This paper examines the relationship between gun ownership and
crime. Previous research has suffered from a lack of reliable data on
gun ownership. I exploit a unique data set to reliably estimate annual
rates of gun ownership at both the state and the county levels during
the past two decades. My findings demonstrate that changes in gun
ownership are significantly positively related to changes in the homicide rate, with this relationship driven almost entirely by an impact
of gun ownership on murders in which a gun is used. The effect of
gun ownership on all other crime categories is much less marked.
Recent reductions in the fraction of households owning a gun can
explain one-third of the differential decline in gun homicides relative
to nongun homicides since 1993.

http://www.kellogg.northwestern.edu/faculty/dranove/htm/dranove/coursepages/Mgmt%20469/guns.pdf

This paper provides new estimates of the effect of household gun prevalence on homicide rates,
and infers the marginal external cost of handgun ownership. The estimates utilize a superior proxy
for gun prevalence, the percentage of suicides committed with a gun, which we validate. Using
county- and state-level panels for 20 years, we estimate the elasticity of homicide with respect to gun
prevalence as between +0.1 and +0.3. All of the effect of gun prevalence is on gun homicide rates.
Under certain reasonable assumptions, the average annual marginal social cost of household gun
ownership is in the range $100 to $1800.

http://home.uchicago.edu/~ludwigj/papers/JPubE_guns_2006FINAL.pdf

[SGMRTDARMY]

10. Seriously?

Gary Kleck?
Big time fail. I'll believe the FBI stats before I believe a discredited study.

[DanTex]

11. What are you talking about?

And this is what happens when the NRA crowd is confronted with empirical evidence. As soon as anyone challenges your dogma, all you can come up with is smilies. The FBI statistics are just raw data. You are correct that crime rates have been dropping. But that alone doesn't imply anything about the effect of gun availability on homicide rates -- a lot of things affect crime rates. The conclusions of those two studies I linked to were arrived at by examining gun ownership trends and homicide trends, at the state and county levels, and also controlling for potential confounding factors.

And by the way, neither of those studies is by Gary Kleck. Also, neither of them has been discredited. If you have any substantial criticism of either, I'd love to hear it.

[badtoworse]

2. So what do you suggest as an alternative?

[upaloopa]

3. Take a wild ass guess!

[badtoworse]

5. I'm OK with SYG, so let's leave it alone.

[onehandle]

4. This sounds like a job for the NRAhadists!

Come out of your not-so-undisclosed location and defend!

[Cave_Johnson]

6. I would be interested in the demographic breakdown of the extra 7-9%

IOW, are more law abiding citizens getting shot or does it go more towards the criminal element?

[badtoworse]

7. Great question!