The intellectuals stumblings of the true believer

From 'Stand Your Ground' Laws Are a Greater Health Threat Than Mass Shootings by Brian H. Williams, MD.  The subheading is — They must be repealed.

Stand your ground (SYG) as a concept is reasonably straightforward but the devil is in the definitions and details.  If you are attacked by someone, especially in a public space, is your legal obligation to retreat until cornered or do you have the right to defend yourself from the attack?  The attendant issues are legion.  Where does the attack occur?  In a crowded public place or the privacy of one's own home?  Might others be in danger from the attacker or from your defense?  What constitutes an attack?  What defines a reasonable fear for one's own life?  And so on.

Dr. Williams has an idea of an argument but as an impassioned gun control advocate, he fails to develop the plausible argument that he could make.

Another week, another series of mass shootings in America leaving two dozen dead in three states. Having spent my career on the frontlines as a trauma surgeon and gun violence prevention researcher, I want to highlight a recent report by the RAND Corporation. In it they that stand-your-ground laws -- which declare that people may use deadly force when they reasonably necessary to defend against certain violent crimes -- increase firearm-related homicides. What does a little-known report from a non-partisan think tank have to do with mass shootings? You may be surprised to learn that each year, stand-your-ground laws account for more firearm-related deaths than all mass shootings combined. These laws promote vigilante justice, needless escalation of interpersonal conflicts, and are an increasing threat to public health and safety. Stand-your-ground laws must be repealed.

Straight out of the gates you can see two warning signs.  There is jargon ("mass shootings" undefined) and there is the logical fallacy of appeal to authority ("gun violence prevention researcher").  But there is also the core of an empirical argument.  The number of deaths from stand-your-ground laws exceed the number of deaths from mass shootings.  

Is that a plausible argument?  Certainly, depending on the definitions of deaths arising from stand-your-ground deaths and the definition of mass shooting deaths.  

But there is also a hidden bait-and-switch going on that is elided.  It equates the death of violent perpetrators with the death of innocent victims.  To clarify Williams's argument, compare an alternate hypothetical rendering.  He is arguing that stand-your-ground laws should be repealed because the number of violent criminals killed in the commission of their crimes exceeds the number of innocent victims from mass shootings.  That is quite the non sequitur of an argument.  

Williams is only interested in the absolute number of deaths, not the legal and moral culpability of violent criminals versus innocent victims.

To be even more explicit with made up numbers, let's assume that with stand-your-ground laws, there are 100 violent criminals killed by their intended victims while there are 50 innocent victims from mass shootings.  

Williams is saying that we should repeal stand-your-grown laws because without them, there would only be 50 innocent victims from mass shootings but with the stand-your-ground laws, there will be 150 deaths.  

If one is agnostic about who dies and cares only about the absolute volume of deaths, then there is a logic to Williams's argument.  

Otherwise, we have a non sequitur.  If I care about the deaths of innocent victims and I do not care about the deaths of violent perpetrators, then how big the number is for the number of deaths of violent perpetrators is irrelevant.  

For most the rest of us in the real world, we do care about the context of deaths and assign greater importance to the deaths of innocent victims than we do to the deaths of violent criminals.  And if we do value the innocent victims more than the violent criminals, then Williams's argument falls apart.  Not because of the numbers but because of the categories of innocence and guilt.  

Since there is no federal law requiring you to retreat from a public threat, many states have filled that void. More than half have passed laws allowing individuals to use lethal force in public if they feel their life is in danger. Most do not mandate a duty to retreat even when the person being threatened can safely do so. The result has been an increase in firearm-related homicides, injuries, and incarceration with no evidence of a decrease in crime. Ostensibly, these laws were meant to deter violent crime. They do not.

Instead, stand-your-ground laws increase firearm-related injuries and death. In fact, in comparison to mass shootings -- which comprise less than 1% of the more than 45,000 annual firearm-related deaths -- a study published in JAMA showed that stand-your-ground laws lead to an increase in 700 deaths per year; that is several years of all mass shootings combined (in the context of the average number of mass shooting casualties from 2009-2020). Clearly, stand-your-ground laws are a significant public health issue resulting in hundreds of preventable deaths annually, even eclipsing the human toll of mass shootings. While both types of shootings are essential to address, the issue of stand-your-ground laws receive relatively little attention.

For a public health expert, there is a striking disregard for definitions and categories.  For example, 45,000 annual firearm-related deaths is tragic.  But it is constituted of two distinct categories which have profoundly different public health implications.  

Very roughly, there are 25,000 suicides by gun each year and 20,000 deaths by gun in the commission of a crime.  Suicides are fundamentally a mental health issue.  Guns used in the commission of violent crimes is an entirely different set of causal issues.  They are distinct from one another and the only reason to combine them is to gain some sort of rhetorical emphasis.  A discrediting tactic for a supposed expert.

Williams is not explicit about the actual numbers he is considering in making his argument, though he does include links which allow us to back into the actual empirical situation about which he is upset.

We have one part of his equation.  He believes that stand-your-ground laws have lead to 700 additional deaths each year out of the 20,000 violent crime deaths that occur.  The study which produces the 700 figure is from gun control advocates and is merely a statistical analysis with quite a lot of methodological limitations in their approach.  Most importantly, it fails to quantify by context.  For example, one might conclude that 3.5% of all non-suicide gun deaths are due to victims shooting their attackers.  But the study does not make that distinction.  It merely observes that in some states, violent gun deaths increase after stand-your-ground laws are passed, not distinguishing between victim deaths and perpetrator deaths.

According to the Pew Research to which Williams links, between 40 and 500 people are killed in mass shootings each year.  Specifically, according to the FBI definition of mass shootings, 38 people are killed each year in mass shootings whereas if you use the much broader mass shooting definition of the gun-control advocacy group, Gun Violence Archive, there are 513 mass shooting deaths each year.  

The more you get into the analytic details, the weaker Williams's argument becomes.  But having done the legwork of finding the data to which he merely alludes, his argument comes down to this:  There are 700 additional deaths when there are stand-your-ground laws versus up to 513 deaths from mass shootings.

When finally put in plain language, the non sequitur is glaring.  

And Williams does not address the crux of the issue.  Stand-your-ground laws are intended to protect innocent victims of crime from being prosecuted if they defend themselves.  If there are 700 additional homicides in a year because innocent victims are accidentally shooting other people when they defend themselves from the criminal aggressor, that is clearly an undesirable outcome.  If, however, the 700 additional deaths are entirely due to criminals killed in the commission of their violent crime, then the argument becomes more murky.  

Williams (and the study) is silent on the nature of the 700 deaths.  

Williams is also pretty silent on the possible violent crime suppression effect of stand-your-ground.  SYG laws are almost always advanced under two arguments.  The first is that it protects innocent victims from being prosecuted if they kill a violent attacker.  Second is that by empowering citizens to protect themselves, it changes the calculus of criminals and theoretically should decrease the volume of crime.

There is lots of talk about the second argument and only some studies and none of them of the size, methodological rigor, and overall robustness to finally resolve the argument.  Rather than acknowledge that, Williams merely dismisses the whole issue.

This whole argument by Williams is muddled and deceptive and it is not clear to me how much he is clear in his own mind as to the position he is taking.  

The resolution of the non sequitur argument of SYG versus mass shootings becomes clear at the end of the article.

We must not dismiss the human toll and collective psychological trauma of mass shootings. Still, stand-your-ground laws are a threat to public health and safety, and should be repealed. The laws promote vigilantism, increase firearm-related deaths, and worsen racial disparities in criminal justice. When lethal force is unrestrained in the face of an avoidable threat, none of us are safe until all of us are safe.

Williams is struggling for ground against other gun control advocates.  He wants the focus to be on repealing SYG laws rather than policies addressing mass shootings.  That is why he is trying to introduce the 700 SYG deaths versus the 40-500 mass shooting deaths issue.  

He makes no evidentiary argument that SYG increases vigilantism, he merely asserts it to be the case.  

He clarifies that his public health interest is not in terms of innocent victim deaths or even in terms of overall deaths.  He is primarily interested in racial inequities.  

For your ordinary citizen on the other hand, it matters what the numbers actually are and they look something like 20,000 violent gun homicides of which about 40 (per the FBI) arise from mass shootings.  It is unknown whether SYG results in an increase in deaths of criminal perpetrators by innocent victims and it is unknown whether SYG laws reduce the overall rate of violent crime.

Williams is making a kinetic argument with little or no logical, rational, or empirical arguments to support his position.  What a waste of time by a public health expert concerned about racial equity.