Before dissecting two Wall Street Journal articles on defensive-gun uses and Stand Your Ground laws, it is worth noting that the anti-gun skew in these articles are not necessarily symbolic of the entire paper’s politics.
Two of my brothers have worked for the Wall Street Journal—both for the Opinion page. Through them I have met many of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial and opinion editors and writers. I am also a long-time subscriber. I appreciate that they often publish John Lott. I lauded them here when they published a piece from William English detailing how he has been treated by the mainstream media since publishing data (2021 National Firearms Survey) estimating that armed citizens use their guns defensively about 1.67 million times annually; and that, indeed, “in most defensive incidents (81.9%) no shot was fired.”
But that is the Wall Street Journal’s Opinion page.
The newspaper’s newsroom is another matter; indeed, the differences between the two has gone public. In July 2020, more than 280 Wall Street Journal newsroom employees (reporters, editors and others) signed a public letter criticizing the Opinion page.
At the time, the Opinion board responded with a note to readers saying they wouldn’t yield to “cancel-culture pressure.”
I note this, not to take sides—there is still a lot worth reading, in my opinion, in much of this storied newspaper—but instead to ask why the Journal—we might expect this from The New York Times—has recently run two “news” pieces (here and here) that are carefully written to make people think armed citizens somehow have licenses to murder and that Stand Your Ground laws give them this power over life and death.
The first, which ran on October 28, was titled “Six Words Every Killer Should Know: ‘I Feared for My Life, Officer.’” This article claimed that “it’s easier than ever to kill someone in America and get away with it,” because of Stand Your Ground laws.
The paper claimed that justifiable homicides by civilians increased by 59% from 2019 through 2024 in a “large sample of cities and counties” in 30 states that have Stand Your Ground statutes.
First, the fact that citizens have the right and the means to defend their lives and their loved ones is not a bad thing.
If this right—with rights come great responsibilities—is being misused, then honest reporting should bring this out, but that is not what the carefully mined data is showing here.
The data on justified homicides they used came from “the FBI’s National Incident Based Reporting System, a modernized crime-reporting system known as NIBRS.”
For some reason, the reporters here used data from the six-year period of 2019 through 2024. Why? The article doesn’t make any claims about when the Stand Your Ground laws were enacted or if they all were enacted, in say, 2018 or 2019 (they were not).
So where is the causation?
Then, even though the laws they cite apply statewide, the article only refers to increases “in a large sample of cities and counties in those states.” Why didn’t they just use state-level data?
The authors of the article did admit the data was incomplete and that “NIBRS only covered about half the country in 2019, and even by 2024, police agencies that cover large portions of California, Pennsylvania, Florida and a handful of other states weren’t reporting through the system.” But why didn’t they then try to find a correlation with data that could be compared?
Clearly, they were mining the statistics to create an anti-Second Amendment narrative.
If they are going to say, “It’s easier than ever to kill someone in America and get away with it,” then they’d better have some very solid evidence.
They didn’t.
Indeed, according to John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, they ignored a letter he sent in to highlight the problems with the article.
In his letter, which is on his website, Lott says, “While justifiable homicides have risen as more people can defend themselves, the same FBI data it cites show that murder and violent crime rates fell over the same period between 2019 and 2024. When laws make it riskier for criminals to attack others—by allowing potential victims to defend themselves—there are fewer crime victims.”
NRA-ILA also ripped into this article: “While the article’s point seemed to be that the confrontations could have been avoidable with more discretion on the defenders’ parts, all of them culminated in circumstances where self-defense was plausibly reasonable.”
In a second article, which ran on November 15, the Wall Street Journal focused on “the self-defense cases that made Jacksonville No. 1 in legal homicides.” The Journal again alleged that Stand Your Ground laws are letting people get away with murder. But the one example they give, as unfortunate as it is, detailed what appeared to be an illegal drug sale gone bad.
Crime statistics are complicated things. Journalists with the Wall Street Journal should be honest about that instead of trying to deceive. They might even balance tragic stories, such as the few in these two articles, with some of the examples that appear in the NRA’s The Armed Citizen column. Our nation clearly needs more solid reporting, not more anti-gun advocacy masquerading as journalism.
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