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Giffords: Increase in Defensive Gun Uses ‘Must Be Stopped’

When I covered the WSJ’s hit piece on Stand Your Ground laws on Wednesday, I wondered if the reporters had any behind-the-scenes help from gun control activists.

It’s not proof of anything, but since the story appeared online only one gun control group has promoted the story on X or Bluesky.

The premise of the WSJ story is that Stand Your Ground laws have led to a 59% increase in the number of justifiable homicides in some states between 2019 and 2024, and that the law is allowing some folks to literally get away with murder.

As we discussed yesterday, though, none of the anecdotal cases cited by WSJ in support of that premise are slam dunk examples of murders that were deemed justified as a result of SYG laws. The data set used by the paper is also suspect, since it did not include the significant number of states where Stand Your Ground exists in common law but not specifically in statute.

There are only 11 states that impose a general duty to retreat before acting in self-defense. The vast majority of states don’t require you to present your back as a target to your attacker while you try to run away; instead, they allow you to act in self-defense so long as you have a reasonable belief of imminent death or great bodily harm.

Stand Your Ground laws also aren’t really a new thing. Florida’s statute, for instance, has been in place for two decades. If the law automatically led to more unjustified shootings being deemed justifiable homicides by the courts, we would have expected to see that phenomenon occur long before 2020, but there’s no evidence that’s the case.

We saw a huge spike in violent crime in 2020, along with a big spike in new gun owners. That’s the most likely reason for an increase in justifiable homicides since then; with more crimes being committed and more people carrying for self-defense, there are more occasions when legally armed citizens will use a firearm to defend themselves. That doesn’t mean, however, that people are getting away with murder just because they tell police that they were in fear for their lives. Every time a life is taken a police investigation is going to take place, and charges may very well be filed even when there’s evidence of self-defense.

Even using the WSJ’s own flawed dataset, the percentage of homicides deemed justified in SYG states has climbed from about 2.8% in 2019 to 3.8% in 2024. We don’t know how many self-defense claims were raised in the 96.2% of homicides that were deemed murder, but we know the number isn’t “zero.” Stand Your Ground laws aren’t a “get-out-of-jail free” card for armed citizens, despite the slanted reporting from the WSJ and Gifffords’ wild suggestion that many or all of these justifiable homicides are actually murder.

Take this recent case from Stand Your Ground-Wyoming. Back on June 24 of this year a man named Kevin Hefley was shot and killed. It wasn’t until this week that the Laramie County Sheriff’s Office and the local D.A. officially deemed the shooting justified, with the sheriff’s office declaring it had “meticulously” investigated the case over the past several months despite what appears to be pretty clear evidence that the armed citizen had reason to believe his life was in danger.

Deputies responded at 4:22 p.m. that afternoon to a “disturbance” involving a shooting, says the sheriff’s office’s statement.

Earlier that day, Christine Hefley moved horses from the property she and Kevin shared to Patrick Gross’s property, “upsetting Kevin,” the statement says.

The two men had a recent history of conflict.

The sheriff’s office reports that on the morning of the shooting, Kevin Kefley threatened Gross via text message, saying, “I shoulda kicked your ass right in your own home.”

Later while Gross was parked in his own driveway, Kevin Hefley drove rapidly towards him, reportedly.

“Just prior to being rammed by Hefley, Gross shot Hefley’s radiator in an attempt to stop the vehicle,” says the statement, adding that later crash reconstruction indicated that Kevin Hefley hit Gross’s truck at 60 mph, “constituting the threat of deadly force.”

Kevin Hefley got out of his vehicle, approached Gross who was in hiw own truck, and punched him multiple times.

During the altercation, Gross shot Kevin Hefley, the statement says.

Though shot, Kevin Hefley kept attacking Gross while clinging to the driver’s door of Gross’s truck as Gross tried to drive away, the sheriff’s office reports.

Kevin Hefley kept attacking until he died of his injuries, the statement adds.

The sheriff’s office says investigators examined the scene “meticulously,” built advanced crash reconstruction analysis and analyzed evidence from phones and social media.

Kevin Hefley’s blood alcohol content was 0.143%, nearly twice the legal limit to drive, says the statement.

The statement says the Laramie County District Attorney’s Office has concluded that Gross acted in self-defense.

This is an example of the “legally sanctioned killings” that Giffords says must be stopped, which begs the question: would they have uttered a word if Hefley had managed to kill Gross by ramming into his truck at 60 mph, or by beating him to death afterwards?

Of course not. No gun would have been used, so there would be no reason for the gun control group to offer any kind of comment. It’s defensive gun uses like Gross’s they think must be stopped, not the actions of violent criminals that lead lawful gun owners to act in self-defense. I guess that shouldn’t be surprising coming from a group whose founder is working for a future with “no more guns,” but it’s a position that puts Giffords at odds with both the Constitution and common sense.