Title: Effects of Stand-Your-Ground Laws on Violent Crime | RAND
Headings: Effects of Stand-Your-Ground Laws on Violent Crime
Effects of Stand-Your-Ground Laws on Violent Crime
Key Findings
The Experts Weigh In
Incidence Rate Ratios Associated with the Effect of Stand-Your-Ground Laws on Violent Crime
Conclusions
Notes
References
Senior Behavioral Scientist, Director of the National Collaborative on Gun Violence Research

Content: They controlled for secular trends, random effects for counties, time-varying county-level socioeconomic and demographic factors, and state-level incarceration rates and law enforcement expenditures. Using county-level data from 1984 to 2015, the authors found that stand-your-ground laws were associated with significantly higher rates of firearm homicide (incidence rate ratio [IRR] = 1.07; 95-percent CI = 1.05, 1.10), whereas the laws had an uncertain relationship with nonfirearm homicide rates. These estimates support that stand-your-ground laws increase firearm homicide rates, although the failure to adjust standard errors to account for serial correlation may have resulted in artificially inflated significance. Finally, Guettabi and Munasib (2018) used a synthetic control method approach to estimate how stand-your-ground laws affect firearm-related homicides and unintentional deaths combined. [ 3] For each of the 14 states that passed a stand-your-ground law between 2005 and 2007, the authors used the synthetic control method approach to generate a weighted combination of control states (i.e., a "synthetic control") that approximated the pre-law firearm homicid