Everytown Touts New Study Claiming ‘Stand Your Ground’ Laws Are Racist

The anti-gun group Everytown for Gun Safety highlighted in a recent email to supporters a new study that supposedly claims “Stand Your Ground” (SYG) laws are racist and result in more homicides and violent crime.

The study, according to Everytown, “concludes the laws do not improve public safety and have led to increases in violent crime and homicide in Florida and other states.” In addition, “the review… also highlighted evidence of racial bias in the outcomes of cases where someone invokes a ‘Stand Your Ground’ defense.”

There’s just one problem: the study in question proves none of these things. Instead, it found almost no evidence that SYG laws increase violent crime and even less evidence that their outcomes are determined by racial bias.

“Overall, expanding rights and protections for the use of deadly force in self-defense outside the home had an average null to small positive association with firearm homicide, total homicide, robberies, and aggravated assaults across the United States,” the study finds.

Later, it concludes, “The weight of this evidence suggests that expanding civilian rights to use deadly force in self-defense outside the home is associated with, at most, modest increases, on average, in the rates of violent crime (including total and firearm homicide, aggravated assault, and robbery) across the United States.”

The anti-gun group also chose not to mention how SYG laws are supposedly racist. Most readers would likely assume that SYG laws are racist because white people use them to get away with killing black people.

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