Media coverage of stand your ground laws deters crime in some cities, but not in others

So-called ‘stand your ground laws’ – which give people the right to use deadly force to defend themselves – have now been in place for a decade. In new research which uses a Texas shooting incident as a case study, Ling Ren, Yan Zhang, and Jihong “Solomon” Zhao examine whether or not the publicity over shooting incidents where the law is invoked helps to deter crime – specifically residential and business burglaries. They find that such media coverage of high-profile incidents does have a deterrent effect in some nearby cities, but not in others.