‘Stand Your Ground,’ Self-Defense and the Rhetoric That Emboldened Recent Shooters Pro-gun groups on the right have for years promoted the right to armed self-defense and warned of pervasive threats.

Gregory Kielma • June 18, 2023

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Pro-gun groups on the right have for years promoted the right to armed self-defense and warned of pervasive threats. Experts and critics say the recent shootings of innocent people are the consequence.

Ringing the wrong doorbell, pulling into the wrong driveway, accidentally getting in the wrong car: Mundane, everyday mistakes ended in the shootings of several young people – and the death of one of them – last month when the men on the receiving end of the errors reached for their firearms and decided to shoot.

The shootings captured public attention nationwide, breaking through the unfortunate white noise of pervasive gun violence for their brazenness and similarities. They have reignited the fight over so-called “stand your ground” laws expanding the legal protections around self-defense. And critics, too, have pointed to the incidents as the natural end result of a society flooded with firearms.

But experts and gun control advocates say the shootings are a symptom of a much broader cause: the proliferation of rhetoric on the pro-gun right and among conservatives in general about persistent, pervasive threats, danger and crime, and also of guns as the only means of personal safety against the criminals that lurk around every corner.

“For seven years, all of us here today have been engaged in an epic struggle against the corrupt forces and communist maniacs – and they’re all over the place – that are absolutely trying to destroy our country,” former President Donald Trump said this month in a speech at the National Rifle Association’s annual meeting. “They want to take away your guns while throwing open the jailhouse doors and releasing bloodthirsty criminals into your communities.”

Wayne LaPierre, the embattled chief executive officer of the pro-gun organization, expressed similar sentiments.

“You don’t need the government to tell you the sky is blue, water’s wet or that you have the God-given right to self-defense,” he said.

‘This Could Happen to Anybody’

In Kansas City, Missouri, Ralph Yarl, a Black teenager, rang the wrong doorbell on April 13 while trying to pick up his siblings from a friend’s house. The octogenarian homeowner inside the house shot Yarl in the head in what he said was self-defense, in an action prosecutors say had a “racial component.” Two days later in upstate New York, a car full of young people pulled into the wrong driveway while looking for another friend’s house. The homeowner shot at the car from the porch. Twenty-year-old Kaylin Gillis died. And just days after that, a man shot two teenage cheerleaders in Elgin, Texas, after one of them tried to get into his car by accident, thinking it was her ride. She realized her mistake, exited the car and tried to apologize. But the man opened fire. Yarl’s shooting made headlines in part because it highlighted issues relating to race, and public attention quickly turned to the other shootings in the days after. Though the U.S. experiences gun violence at the highest rate of any developed nation, the shootings broke through the news cycle in part because they easily inspired empathy.

Gun Control and Gun Rights Cartoons

“This could happen to anybody. I mean, there was a racial factor involved in at least one of these. But beyond that, it's just like, this could happen to me or this could happen to my kid,” says Michael Lawlor, an associate professor of criminal justice at the University of New Haven and a former member of the Connecticut House of Representatives. Lawlor, a Democrat, also served as the state’s undersecretary for criminal justice policy.

Focus turned, then, on Missouri’s “stand your ground” law, which is like a law of the same name that is in place in Texas. Gun rights advocates have pushed for years to enact the measures, which expand protections around the use of force when acting in self-defense. Under the law, a person has the right to use deadly force when acting in self-defense anywhere they have a legal right to be, and without first retreating – in other words, using force does not have to be a last resort. The laws burst onto the public debate stage in 2012, when Florida police noted it as the reason they refused to arrest George Zimmerman, who fatally shot Trayvon Martin, a Black unarmed teenager. Zimmerman was later charged and then acquitted.

New York has a similar, albeit more limited, law called the “castle doctrine” that allows for use of force by a person defending their own home – or castle, so to speak. And the passage of “stand your ground” laws has happened in concert with a focused emphasis by the pro-gun right on crime, threats, and self-defense. While promoting firearms as a tool for self-defense is not a new idea, the expansion of laws allowing for use of deadly force may contribute to a climate where gun owners are more ready to do so, says Matthew Lacombe, an associate professor of political science at Case Western University who specializes in gun politics, the NRA and political ideology.

“The NRA narrative that you might use guns for armed self-defense is not new. What is newer is liberalization of particularly state-level laws pertaining to how, when and why you can use lethal force to defend yourself,” Lacombe says.

The men who perpetrated the recent shootings will likely not be covered under such laws, Lacombe notes. But in a wider context, “it's probably the case that the general shift legally has encouraged more and more people to think about self-defense in these terms, encouraged more people to buy guns specifically for self-defense purposes, and in some ways emboldened them in terms of what they see as a reasonable use of them,” he says. The NRA Institute for Legislative Action, which has championed the laws, did not respond to a request for comment about the recent shootings and self-defense laws.

Politicians and advocates for more restrictive gun control laws have pointed the finger at “stand your ground” laws for such an embodiment.

“I think we now have a shoot-first, ask-later policy in this state – or at least that is what people have interpreted it to be,” Missouri state Rep. Maggie Nurrenbern, a Democrat, was quoted by The Kansas City Star as saying in the wake of Yarl’s shooting. Nurrenbern introduced a measure in the legislature earlier this year to limit the state’s law, but the bill went nowhere. The context around the laws, including a focus on firearms as a means for self-defense as opposed to other uses, Lacombe says, is critical for understanding what effect they may have on society.

“It's not just the laws, it's also the sort of marketing campaigns and rhetoric surrounding the laws, which I think have increasingly turned the gun-rights space into one focused on armed self-defense specifically, as opposed to other uses of guns,” Lacombe says.

Part of that context also includes a pervasive narrative pushed by pro-gun advocates and the NRA that has intertwined gun rights and core values like freedom, making expansive gun rights a core part of the conservative ideology – even identity. “Owning a gun isn't just having an object that you might use for recreation or self-defense, but it's more of a sort of symbol of who you are and what you stand for. And part of that relates to self-sufficiency,” Lacombe says of the narrative. “We think of self-sufficiency as being politically coded – you know, ‘I don't need handouts’ – but it's also in recent years come to even involve notions of protection.”

Fear and Freedom

Republicans have in recent years emphasized crime and threats in their electoral messaging around – a threat they say is posed by an “invasion” of illegal immigration, the threat posed by criminals emboldened by Democrats’ soft-on-crime policies, the threat of eroding rights and norms.

“The sinister forces trying to kill America have done everything they can to stop me, to silence you, and to turn this nation into a socialist dumping ground for criminals, junkies, Marxists, thugs, radicals and dangerous refugees that no other country wants,” Trump told the crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference earlier this year. “If those opposing us succeed, our once-beautiful USA will be a failed country that no one will even recognize – a lawless, open-borders, crime-ridden, filthy, communist nightmare.”

Trump is considered the current front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. His comments echo narratives threaded through many right-leaning news and commentary shows and other forms of media, as well as the electoral strategies of other candidates.

Fear is an old and effective political motivator, experts say, and that motivation was also on display at the NRA’s annual meeting earlier this month, with speeches replete with warnings about self-defense, crime and protecting freedoms from those who want to take it away by force.

“Threat is a pretty powerful motivator, so associating support for gun rights with addressing different types of threats is something that historically has worked pretty well for the NRA,” Lacombe says.

Lawlor, the criminal justice professor, and former state legislator, describes fear and threat as a “political business model” that shifts and changes in topic over the years but remains a pervasive strategy.

“In 2004, the presidential election was all about gay marriage. Right now, it’s all about drag queens. A couple of cycles ago, it was all about immigrant caravans. There is always something that can be that thing that everyone should fear,” Lawlor says. “And so, we're back to crime now. That's where we are now – that you should be scared that someone's going to steal your car or break into your house.”

Though crime rates vary by city, the violent crime rate in the U.S. overall has plummeted since the 1990s, when gang violence associated with an epidemic of crack cocaine fueled urban homicide rates. In fact, violent crime rates have been slashed by more than half – though polling shows that Americans believe the number has gone up, despite the data.

The result of threat-based rhetoric, Lawlor argues, can be what happened in Missouri – a senior citizen “who's watching Fox News all day with the volume all the way on max, has a gun, of course, to protect themselves, and he's been told that sooner or later, some Black guy is going to show and try and kill you or break into your house or whatever.”

‘There's a 16-year-old kid knocking on his door by mistake, and – boom, right? So this outcome is predictable,” he says.

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