By Caroline Light
Our history books, our memorials, and our lore celebrate armed defiance in the face of overwhelming odds, of resisting the urge to flee in the face of fear. From the American Revolution to the Alamo to Iwo Jima, our nation’s favorite stories of the past venerate militaristic heroism and bold defiance over appeasement and retreat. Recently, however, roughly coincident with the turn of the millennium, our admiration for defensive militarism has transformed into a pressing call for individual, DIY security.
The defensively armed citizen has become, in some quarters, the paragon of patriotism. A Wyoming bumper sticker, for instance, welcomes visitors while warning potential criminals to “consider everyone armed.” Thirty-three states have adopted laws allowing for lethal self-defense outside of one’s home since 2005, and approximately thirteen million civilians are licensed to carry concealed firearms. Colorado’s self-defense law is named after Clint Eastwood’s much-quoted provocation, “Make my day,” and homeowners across the nation post “We Don’t Call 911” signs in their yards, warning would-be burglars that a home intrusion will be met with immediate lethal violence. The anxiety of individual security solutions—usually related to guns—permeates our culture.
The voices promoting self-defense as an urgent need grow louder with each mass shooting. After a gunman killed 26 people at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in December 2012, gun sales spiked. Public figures, including Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky and Representative Louie Gohmert of Texas, lamented that, had the classrooms and teachers been outfitted with firearms, the tragedy would never have happened. Shortly thereafter, the National Rifle Association sponsored a report, National School Shield, calling for armed guards in all American schools.
Perception is everything: if we live in a world full of terrorists, violent criminals, and “illegal” immigrants, with a government unwilling or unable to protect us, we law-abiding citizens must take matters into our own hands. More and more we look to the heroic armed citizen who refuses to depend on others for protection as the ethical core of this powerful, ostensibly democratic and democratizing impulse. DIY-security citizenship holds each of us responsible for our own self-defense and celebrates self-reliance and independence in the face of danger. In the oft-repeated words of the NRA’s executive vice president, Wayne LaPierre, “The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”
Many of us are taking this message to heart, and more people than ever seek to carry their firearms beyond the confines of their homes. Since 1990, the number of people with concealed-carry permits has risen from one million to approximately 13 million; as of 2014, every state has provisions allowing qualified civilians to apply for concealed-carry licenses. The rapid normalization of gun-carrying DIY-security citizenship owes much to the 2008 Supreme Court ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller, which affirmed an individual’s “right to keep and carry weapons in case of confrontation,” and cleared a path for stand-your-ground laws. Delivering the majority opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia interpreted the Second Amendment as “surely elevat[ing] above all other interests the right of law-abiding, responsible citizens to use arms in defense of hearth and home.”
On their surface, such laws provide legal justification and criminal immunity to any person who uses deadly force in self-defense. There is significant variation among state Stand Your Ground laws, but all of them emphasize the right to use lethal force when one experiences what a “reasonable person” would consider a threat, even if the person could safely retreat from the perceived danger.
Contrary to gun advocates’ claims that an armed citizenry and robust self-defense laws deter crime, states with Stand Your Ground laws have seen a significant increase in homicides. The language of these laws promises self-defense rights to everyone, but crime statistics from the past decade reveal that Stand Your Ground laws have exacerbated racial discrepancies in the adjudication of self-defense. Whites who kill blacks in states with Stand Your Ground laws are more than eleven times more likely to escape conviction than blacks who kill whites.
Given our present association of DIY security with good citizenship, one might suppose that the United States has always been a “shoot first, ask questions later” nation. The Heller decision rested on Justice Scalia’s “originalist” interpretation of the Second Amendment, in which he considered its intended meaning at the time of its adoption in 1791. Yet at that time, a “law-abiding citizen” openly carrying a firearm was perceived as earnestly invested in an effort to protect himself, his wife and children, and his property. Open carry in the 18th and 19th centuries was based on the logic that a visibly displayed weapon would discourage confrontations, while concealed weapons were primarily carried by criminals and people who were otherwise up to no good.
Sir William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England, published in 1769, summarized English common law in detail. “To excuse homicide by the plea of self-defence,” Blackstone wrote, “it must appear that the slayer had no other possible (or at least probable) means of escaping from his assailant.” The Commentaries provided guidance to the framers of what would become the U.S. legal system. The original English common law heritage on which our legal structure is based reserved lethal punishment exclusively for the Crown. In his volume Public Wrongs, in which he discussed criminal law, Blackstone wrote, “Of crimes injurious to the persons of private subjects, the most principal and important is the offence of taking away that life, which is the immediate gift of the Creator.” If one were attacked or threatened, the king and his laws, not the individual, would avenge the injury.
Valuing human life above property, English common law imposed a robust duty to retreat, which commanded that one “retreat to the wall behind one’s back” before meeting force with force. Yet, in the United States, the idea of backing away from a threat or of allowing the state to protect one from harm clashed with the ideals of independence and individual rights on which the nation was founded. The duty to retreat eroded quickly in the United States, abandoned in favor of a selective right to kill.
Although the United States accounts for just 4.4 percent of the world’s population, we possess 40 to 50 percent of the world’s civilian-owned guns, and the stockpiling of weapons continues. The United States has experienced close to a thousand mass shootings since the Sandy Hook massacre of December 2012, and many believe that the solution to these acts of mass violence is to continue to build our arsenal. Fears of terrorism and rampant criminality fuel what historian Jill Lepore foretells will be “an end to civilian life,” when we are all engaged in panic-induced DIY security and “the only good citizen is an armed one.”
Adapted from Stand Your Ground: A History of America’s Love Affair with Lethal Self-Defense by Caroline Light (Beacon Press, 2017). Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press. Caroline Light is director of undergraduate studies in the Program in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Harvard University and the author of That Pride of Race and Character: The Roots of Jewish Benevolence in the Jim Crow South.
