On Last Week Tonight, John Oliver discussed one corner of endemic gun violence and the influence of the gun lobby in the US: so-called “stand your ground” laws, which provide legal cover for shootings in which the perpetrator claims justified fear.
Stand your ground laws, which have proliferated in numerous states in the past 15 years, were already redundant upon passage. Many states already had self-defense laws on the book with “duty to retreat” caveats – you couldn’t resort to using deadly force if you could afford to safely avoid it or de-escalate a confrontation.
“The key thing stand your ground laws did was remove that duty to retreat from public places,” Oliver explained. “Basically, extending the ‘castle doctrine’” – the legal theory extending self-defense to one’s property – “to anywhere you have a legal right to be. If you have a reasonable fear someone might hurt you, you have just as much right to shoot them in the street as you would if they were coming through the window of your house.”
Stand your ground laws “can make determining questions of guilt incredibly difficult”, Oliver continued, “because it all comes down to perceived fear, whether you legitimately saw someone as a threat, and that is definitionally subjective. What I am afraid of – snakes, clowns and Tilda Swinton – might not be what you are.”
Stand your ground provide wide cover for acts of violence – they’ve been successfully invoked, Oliver pointed out, for shootings in arguments over dog weight, or over the volume of music in a car. “The fact is, we now know overall that not only do stand your ground laws not deter crime, they may actually increase violence,” Oliver said, citing a 2020 report from the Journal of the American College of Surgeons which found homicides increased by 10.8% in states with stand your ground laws; the homicide rate went down by 2.3% in states without the laws.
“And if you’re thinking well, come on, you can’t draw a straight line between these specific laws and people’s actions, in some cases, you very much can,” Oliver added, pointing to the case of Joe Horn, one of the first people to employ the stand your ground defense in Texas. In 2007, Horn called 911 to report a burglary at his neighbor’s house, and discussed shooting the intruders with the dispatcher. Though the dispatcher warned Horn 14 times not to shoot the intruders, Horn cited the new Texas stand your ground law, claimed it was his right to go outside and defend himself since “I’m not going to let them get away with it”, and shot and killed the two men. He was never arrested, and was never charged with a crime.
“He was explicitly told that property is not worth shooting people over, which is obviously true, and certainly not your neighbor’s property,” Oliver fumed. “If I found out my neighbor shot and killed two people to save my PS5, I would move tomorrow. I know they’re hard to get your hands on, but Jesus Christ, calm down. I don’t want your blood console.”
The laws have also spawned a “cottage industry” of specialized self-defense legal assistance, including memberships, money for legal defense and cards provided by the US Concealed Carry Association with tips on how to speak to 911 after shooting someone.
“They’ve essentially created a get-out-of-jail-free card,” Oliver said. “It seems all you have to do is memorize a few key phrases, and you too could be free to shoot with impunity. It’s basically Rosetta Stone for justified homicides.”
“You probably know where this is going, because while most civilian shootings involve people of the same race, when cases involve shootings across racial lines, there are significant disparities in whose fear gets believed.” To quote the Ohio representative Stephanie Howse, a black woman, on the state house floor in opposition to its ‘stand your ground’ law in 2018: “What do you do in places and spaces when your presence – literally your face, your face! – causes someone to be fearful of you…This is a bad idea for people that look like me.”
“That is just one of the things that make these laws so dangerous,” Oliver said. “They can exalt a white person’s fear over a black person’s life.
“Stand your ground laws have contributed to a society where vigilantes with guns feel they have the right to decide what is safety, who is a threat and what the punishment should be,” he continued. “They have turbo-charged everything from road rage incidents to pointless disputes over dog weight.”
What is to be done? The answer, Oliver concluded, is straightforward: don’t pass any more ‘stand your ground’ laws, and repeal the ones on the books. “They’re redundant solutions to a made-up problem and they are actively doing harm.”
