Back in the days when I watched South Park regularly, the early seasons featured a crazy hunter known as “Uncle Jimbo.” Jimbo, a gun enthusiast, was no fan of hunting restrictions. He would take his rifle out to the woods and poach game while claiming self-defense, yelling “It’s coming right for us!” before shooting.
Apparently, the Wall Street Journal watches a lot of early South Park episodes. Today, they feature an analysis of justifiable homicides in the US with the claim that a 59% increase in such incidents over the last five years can be explained by six words: I feared for my life, officer. “It’s easier than ever to kill someone in America,” they report, “and get away with it.”
Is it?
While Americans have long been free to use deadly force to defend themselves at home, so-called stand-your-ground laws in those 30 states extend legal protections to public places and make it difficult for prosecutors to file homicide charges against anyone who says they killed in self-defense.
The number of legally sanctioned homicides by civilians in the 30 stand-your-ground states has risen substantially in recent years, The Wall Street Journal found in an analysis of data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
Justifiable homicides by civilians increased 59% from 2019 through 2024 in a large sample of cities and counties in those states, the Journal found, compared with a 16% rise in total homicides for the same locales.
The percentages look damning, until one recalls the famous adage popularized by Mark Twain: There are lies, damned lies, and statistics. If those cases increased by 59% over five years, what’s the scale involved? How many cases does a 59% increase entail?
Not many, as it turns out. The entire data set consists of 200 cases or fewer in each of the five years, which isn’t exactly a crime spree when it comes to homicides. Take a close look at the Y-axis used by the WSJ to chart this data:
The Y-axis tops out at 200 cases — not 200 per 100,000, just 200 in each year. They note that overall homicides increased 16% in these same jurisdictions over the same period. What does that look like? Curiously, the WSJ doesn’t bother to chart that, so we will have to rely on other data on overall homicides. Statista offers this chart with its own Y-axis scale that offers some perspective:
Find more statistics at Statista
What does this show us? While justifiable homicides peaked at 200 cases in 2023, that represents about 1% of all homicides in the US for that year. (Statista does not have data for 2024 yet.) Clearly, saying an incantation at the scene of a homicde does not provide one with a magic Get Out of Jail Free card.
Next, let’s look at another chart from Statista, which tracked justifiable homicides over a longer period of time for the entire US. This data is broken out between law enforcement and private citizen actors, and that is also telling:
Find more statistics at Statista
First off, this data clearly shows that the increase in justifiable homicide events by private citizens increased across the board, not just in “stand your ground” jurisdictions. In fact, the 2023 peak in the WSJ chart represents much fewer than half of homicides later ruled justifiable. The WSJ attempts to tie an increase in justifiable homicides to “stand your ground” laws when the phenomenon clearly existed across all jurisdictions.
This last chart strongly suggests why. Beginning in 2020, cities and states began pressing law enforcement to retreat from assertive peace-keeping activities, thanks to the death of George Floyd and the radicals who rioted across the US demanding to “defund the police.” The data in all of these charts show a sharp reaction to that change in the environment. The first Statista chart shows an explosion of homicides in 2020, rising 33.6% over the previous year. The last full year of data for overall homicides shows that 2023’s homicide count was still 14.2% higher than in 2019.
The pullback of police likely explains the sharp rise in private-citizen actions. As police retreated, private citizens armed themselves and began to prepare for self-defense, and for very good reasons. In 2020 alone, the number of homicides increased by nearly 6,000, while private-citizen justifiable homicides only increased by thirty-six. Furthermore, this last chart shows that private actions had already been increasing for more than a decade before the WSJ’s chosen baseline of 2019. Why? More Americans had been arming themselves for self-protection during that same period.
The WSJ’s data manipulation is only part of the problem. The “six words” premise and the idea that “stand your ground” laws prevent prosecution are laughable on their face. The standard for self-defense is not whether the person asserts a fear for his/her life, but whether a reasonable fear existed. The Uncle Jimbo Defense is simply absurd. “Stand your ground” laws only eliminate the requirement to flee from a threat before taking action; it does not negate the “reasonable” standard on a threat of death or grave bodily harm, nor does it give a pass to someone who participated in a conflict. In most if not all jurisdictions, you cannot claim self-defense in a fight you start or in which you substantially participate, regardless of “stand your ground” laws. And prosecutors will charge and imprison those who act outside the very tight confines of legal lethal self-defense, no matter what incantation they mutter when police arrive on the scene.
Unfortunately, this is the kind of cherry-picking, data manipulation, and flat-out nonsense we’ve come to expect from the Protection Racket Media, especially on Second Amendment and self-defense issues. It’s beyond disappointing to see it at the Wall Street Journal.
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