Andrew F. Branca, our favorite lawyer/author who holds seminars nationally on the Law of Self Defense, refutes the above JAMA study attacking Stand Your Ground in the linked National Review article. Well written and well worth reading, and Branca demands that JAMA retract the published study because of its flaws and false conclusions.On Monday, the prestigious Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) published a paper on American self-defense law so fundamentally flawed that it is hard to view its publication as anything other than an act of propaganda.
The paper’s title describes its purported purpose: “Evaluating the Impact of Florida’s ‘Stand Your Ground’ Self-defense Law on Homicide and Suicide by Firearm” — and its implicit conclusion is that “Stand Your Ground” is bad public policy because it fosters unlawful killing. Indeed, one of the paper’s authors, Antonio Gasparrini, makes this conclusion explicit in telling the U.K.’s Daily Mail that “this study highlights how Stand Your Ground is likely to be a cause of the rise in Florida murders” (emphasis added).
In fact, the paper does not, and indeed by its very methodology cannot, do anything of the sort. The paper’s defects are numerous, but I shall focus on just two.
The authors of the JAMA study conflate homicides and murders as the same thing (homicides are killing of a person by another person, while murders are unlawful killings). The authors fail to understand that a portion of homicides are lawful killings as when a person shoots an armed robber, rapist, home invader, and also all lawful police killings. As Branca explains, these lawful killings are socially beneficial.
Therefore, the JAMA authors falsely claim a rise in Florida murders after Stand Your Ground was enacted, while the rise was in lawful killings and flat or falling total murders. Their misunderstanding (or willful ignorance) led them astray (thinking gun homicide stats are gun murder stats).
