When statutes theoretically designed to protect do anything but
In June 2015, Carol Bowne, a 39-year-old New Jersey woman, was stabbed to death in her driveway by her ex-boyfriend. She had filed a restraining order against him weeks earlier. She had also applied for a permit to buy a handgun for self-defense and was still waiting when he killed her. The Bowne case became a rallying point in the broader debate about whether the law makes it too hard for women to defend themselves — a debate that might have sounded familiar to those who powered the spread of stand your ground laws across the United States.
But 20 years of evidence on these laws tells a different story. The statutes have not protected women like Carol Bowne. To the contrary, they have made violent encounters more lethal, and they have failed many of the women they were sold to defend.
Stand your ground laws remove the traditional duty to retreat before using force, including deadly force, when a person reasonably believes they face imminent harm in any place they are lawfully entitled to be. Florida enacted the first modern statute in 2005, and more than 30 states have followed. These laws extend an older common-law principle, the castle doctrine, which defined that no-retreat right inside the home, out into parking lots, streets and other public spaces. By removing the duty to retreat, these laws can make confrontations more likely to escalate to deadly force than end without serious injury.
What the evidence says
Researchers using state-level mortality data have repeatedly found that stand your ground laws raise homicide rates without reducing any other category of crime. In a 2017 study, economist Chandler McClellan and I examined monthly death records across the United States and found that a state’s adoption of a stand your ground law led to roughly 30 additional homicides per month, along with an increase in firearm injuries, but no detectable reduction in burglary, robbery or assault. Another study, by economists Cheng Cheng and Mark Hoekstra, examined a closely related set of expansions to castle doctrine laws. They found that these laws increased murder and nonnegligent manslaughter by about 8%, again with no offsetting decrease in other crimes. More recently, public health researcher Michelle Degli Esposti and her colleagues examined homicide deaths nationwide between 1999 and 2017. They similarly estimated an 8% increase in overall homicides associated with stand your ground laws, with effects concentrated in Southern states.
These studies use different data sources, different time periods and different statistical approaches, but they tell one consistent story: Stand your ground laws make violent encounters more deadly. They do not deter crime.
In an analysis of 237 cases compiled by the Tampa Bay Times, researcher Justin Murphy found that men who invoked stand your ground laws were convicted in approximately 40% of cases, whereas women in comparable circumstances were convicted in roughly 80%.
The legal frame that does not fit
But if we focus only on those aggregate numbers, we miss the harder problem. Stand your ground laws were designed around a particular picture of what danger looks like: a sudden confrontation between strangers, in public, with comparable force on each side. That picture rarely matches the violence women actually face.
Most homicides of women in the United States are committed by current or former intimate partners. Violence against women typically unfolds privately, over time, through escalating coercion, threats and abuse rather than in a single moment of attack. By the time a woman defends herself, the threat is often invisible to a prosecutor or jury, because it is not a discrete event but a pattern. Because the legal tests of “imminent” threat and “reasonable” fear were developed for sudden confrontations between strangers rather than the cumulative and ongoing nature of intimate partner violence, they exclude women’s defensive actions from legal recognition.
Why stand your ground laws protect men more than women
The consequences of this mismatch show up clearly in court. In an analysis of 237 cases compiled by the Tampa Bay Times, researcher Justin Murphy found that men who invoked stand your ground laws were convicted in approximately 40% of cases, whereas women in comparable circumstances were convicted in roughly 80%. A doctrine sold as a protection for those who could not retreat has, in practice, protected men in disputes with other men.
The pattern becomes easier to understand when we look at how courts decide what counts as “reasonable” self-defense. Scholars Mary Anne Franks, Caroline Light and Alexa Yakubovich, and Peter Squires have argued that stand your ground laws tend to treat men’s use of violence in public confrontations as defensive and reasonable, while women who use force against abusive partners are more likely to be viewed as having overreacted, acted deliberately or sought revenge. A woman who acts against a partner she has every reason to believe is about to hurt her, based on years of evidence she has accumulated, is often punished for not waiting until the moment of attack. By contrast, a man who stands his ground in a public confrontation is more easily presumed to have acted in fear for his life.
Women, guns and the limits of self-defense
This dynamic is also reshaping how women themselves are thinking about guns. A recent study of women in the Midwest by sociologist Margaret Kelley finds that many women describe firearm ownership as part of their responsibility to protect the people they care about as well as their broader communities. A recent national survey by Matthew Miller and his colleagues shows that nearly half of Americans who became new gun owners between 2019 and 2021 were women, even though women made up only about a third of gun owners overall.
The picture that emerges is not that prepackaged political narrative of an armed citizen deterring a stranger. It is closer to the Carol Bowne story: a woman who already knows who is going to try to kill her, looking for protection in the time it will take for the legal system to act. The research suggests that lowering the threshold for using deadly force increases lethal violence and often disadvantages the very people most vulnerable to it.
What reform could look like
If stand your ground laws are to remain on the books, the most credible reforms are the ones that bring the legal frame closer to women’s actual circumstances. Self-defense laws generally permit deadly force when a person reasonably believes they face imminent death or serious bodily harm. “Imminence” refers to how immediate the threat is, while “reasonableness” asks whether the person’s fear and response were justified under the circumstances. Courts could clarify that these standards account for ongoing patterns of abuse and credible threats, not only what happens in the instant before an attack. States could explicitly direct courts to consider evidence of coercive control, prior abuse and trauma when assessing imminence and reasonableness in domestic violence cases involving stand your ground laws. At the same time, states should publicly report stand your ground outcomes by gender, race and relationship of the parties so that disparities become visible.
These changes would help, but they would not, on their own, solve the problem the Bowne case exposes. Most violence against women does not turn on a moment of self-defense. It turns on whether the system intervenes before that moment arrives. To deliver that help, states and localities need to offer a focused set of interventions, including risk-based firearm removal from people under domestic violence restraining orders, consistent enforcement of those orders, safe housing and legal advocacy for survivors. Research has found that domestic violence laws can reduce abuse, that protection orders can reduce subsequent violence and injury and that firearm prohibitions for people subject to domestic violence restraining orders can reduce intimate-partner homicides. Stand your ground laws operate in a vacuum where those upstream protections are uneven or absent. Reforming the doctrine without strengthening the system around it would leave women to defend themselves with a tool that courts often will not believe they used reasonably.
Conclusion
The promise of stand your ground laws was to enable people to defend themselves when the system has failed to protect them. Two decades on, the evidence runs the other way, particularly with respect to women. The law has raised the homicide rate without lowering any other category of crime, and it has done so while leaving in place a legal framework that gives most women very little when they try to invoke it. Until the law’s idea of a credible threat looks like the kind of threat women actually live with, expanding the right to use deadly force will keep endangering many of the people it purports to protect.
