Texas A&M Study Says Castle-Doctrine Laws Increase Homicides, Don't Deter Crime

[DanTex]

6. Yeah, but the increase was almost all due to non-justifiable homicide.

The study found that the total effect of SYG nationwide was 50 extra justifiable homicides, versus to 500 to 700 extra cases of murder and manslaughter.

In contrast, we find significant evidence that the laws increase homicides.
Suggestive but inconclusive evidence indicates that castle doctrine laws increase the
narrowly defined category of justifiable homicides by private citizens by 17 to 50 percent,
which translates into as many as 50 additional justifiable homicides per year nationally due
to castle doctrine. More significantly, we find the laws increase murder and manslaughter
by a statistically significant 7 to 9 percent, which translates into an additional 500 to 700
homicides per year nationally across the states that adopted castle doctrine. Thus, by
lowering the expected costs associated with using lethal force, castle doctrine laws induce
more of it. This increase in homicides could be due either to the increased use of lethal
force in self-defense situations, or to the escalation of violence in otherwise non-lethal
conflicts. We suspect that self-defense situations are unlikely to explain all of the increase,
as we also find that murder alone is increased by a statistically significant 6 to 11 percent.
This is important because murder excludes non-negligent manslaughter classifications that
one might think are used more frequently in self-defense cases. But regardless of how one
interprets increases from various classifications, it is clear that the primary effect of
strengthening self-defense law is to increase homicide.