Tennessee recently enacted a law making it easier legally to shoot someone who’s stealing the lawnmower, bicycle or power tools you left in your garden shed.
This is a new take on the “stand your ground” doctrine, which lets you defend yourself but not your stuff. Under the expanded provision, you can kill to protect your belongings as long as you believe the interloper is a threat to you or others.
“Stand your ground” laws, or the idea behind them, have existed since the Centennial. The principle is intuitive: A person can’t use force to coerce you. The original conception of self-defense when outside your home was narrower; you needed to avoid violence if at all possible.
Over the years, as more states broadened the acceptable use of deadly force, opponents have blamed it for rising homicide rates and reckless conduct. In March, Melesa Johnson, a top prosecutor in Missouri, said the law required dropping murder charges against men involved in a 2024 shootout that killed a woman and injured dozens at a Super Bowl celebration. Ms. Johnson said such scenarios were becoming more common; her office has declined to pursue twice as many homicide cases per year since the state’s “stand your ground” law took effect in 2016.
This evolution was perhaps inevitable. Since Florida passed the first comprehensive “stand your ground” law in 2005, the right to defend yourself with lethal force has steadily grown. People do not merely own more guns in America. They now have more ways to justify using one to kill another person, simply by invoking an often inchoate sense of fear. This marks a new era of defensible homicides.
It follows a distinctly American strain of thinking in which a person’s honor and autonomy are sacrosanct. Throughout the country’s history, defendants claiming self-defense have argued that their sovereignty is inviolable and must be protected, even to the point of violence. Another trend also shaped, and benefited from, these abstractions: the proliferation of guns themselves.
Protection and honor
The roots of “stand your ground” trace, in part, to an unpleasant episode in New Castle, Ind., on Election Day in 1876. A man named John Runyan ventured into town to learn the results of the presidential race. Runyan was a Democrat in a largely Republican community; he favored Samuel Tilden for president.
Outside the local polling place, he encountered supporters of Rutherford B. Hayes and quickly got into an argument with them. What happened next was in dispute — Runyan claimed he was physically attacked; other witnesses said it was only verbal — but Runyan pulled out a gun and shot one of the men, who later died.
A circuit court indicted Runyan for manslaughter. At his trial, the judge issued a lengthy set of instructions to the jury, which included a disquisition on self-defense. After affirming the right of individuals to protect themselves from assault, sometimes even to the point of killing the aggressor, the judge laid down an important caveat: “If the person assailed can protect his life and his person by retreating, it is his duty to retreat, and thus avoid the necessity of taking human life.”
The judge was articulating a very old concept. English common law, dating back centuries, said you had to retreat in the face of public aggression, as far as possible, before resorting to deadly force. Early American courts followed that precedent, believing people could minimize homicides by requiring at least one party in a dispute to de-escalate.
According to that Old World principle, Runyan was convicted and sentenced to eight years in prison. But he appealed to the Indiana Supreme Court and found a receptive audience. It held that the lower court had erred — not in explaining the legal concept of de-escalation, but in urging Runyan toward the un-American act of running away:
The tendency of the American mind seems to be very strongly against the enforcement of any rule which requires a person to flee when assailed, to avoid chastisement or even to save human life.
The message was clear: Don’t tread on me.
The justices’ rumination on “the American mind,” written as the nation was abuzz with its centennial celebration of independence from the British throne, was getting at something foundational to how their countrymen viewed the world. Americans were different. Not just in the form of government they chose to create, but also in the way they had created it: in an act of violent insurrection against their colonial overlords.
Political and personal violence has an important place in the American story, and guns are at the center of that tale. Firearms played a crucial role in westward expansion, the subjugation of Native peoples, the Civil War and the enforcement of slavery.
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The example of the Revolution seemed to vindicate armed conflict, wrote Richard Maxwell Brown, one of the foremost historians of American violence. It “served as a grand model for later violent actions by Americans in behalf of any cause.” Think of idealized citizen-soldiers like the stoic frontiersman with a six-shooter, Dirty Harry enforcing law and order with a .44 Magnum, Rambo fighting government corruption with his machine gun.
The Indiana justices weren’t the only ones thinking about how violence might be necessary to protect personal honor. Another ruling came down at almost the same time from the Ohio Supreme Court, which found that forcing someone to retreat in the face of aggression was essentially legalized cowardice: “A true man who is without fault is not obliged to fly from an assailant,” the opinion said.
In 1895, the U.S. Supreme Court cited the Indiana and Ohio cases in a landmark ruling that established a common law right to stand one’s ground against an aggressor in public spaces. It was a seismic break from Western tradition, which had previously applied the concept only in the context of defending oneself at home — the “castle doctrine” that had long existed in English common law.
An expanding castle
The idea that a man’s home is his castle had afforded the one exception to the duty to retreat. But now, American courts were saying the castle effectively went with you. You need not be holed up at home to take lethal action.
Courts had declared that standing your ground was a crucial aspect — maybe a necessary condition — of manhood. But they hadn’t arrived at that view in a vacuum: The proliferation of firearms was changing the dynamics of self-defense. Surplus guns flooded the country after the Civil War, and industrialization made their mass production easier. By the 1870s an estimated five million privately owned guns were in circulation, making Americans already “the most heavily armed civilian population in the world,” according to a recent study.
As guns became more common, courts came to see them as just another part of the American experience — and an obvious facet of self-defense doctrine. In Minnesota in 1905, the State Supreme Court overturned the murder conviction of a frontiersman who had shot a neighbor reaching for his gun during an argument.
The justices said firearms had rendered the duty to retreat outdated. It was one thing to try to escape someone on the attack with “fists, clubs and even knives,” they wrote. But “it would be rank folly” to insist on retreat between “experienced men, armed with repeating rifles.”
These rulings set the stage for a new interpretation of the Second Amendment. Its text says nothing explicitly about an individual right to have a gun for everyday self-defense. But if people could kill to save themselves from someone who had a gun, it followed that they should have the right to arms useful for that purpose.
Locating that right in the Constitution became the grand project of the modern gun lobby. Advocacy groups like the National Rifle Association argued that bearing arms wasn’t just about keeping a “well-regulated militia”; it was also, maybe mainly, for protecting yourself. The firearms industry increasingly played upon fears of crime to market its products as manhood-affirming but also necessary to stay safe.
Eventually, a conservative Supreme Court majority adopted the individual-right view in rulings beginning with the groundbreaking case of District of Columbia v. Heller in 2008. It legalized the position that you could have a gun for self-defense in the home, essentially using the castle doctrine to broaden the Second Amendment. The court later extended the right to carrying a gun outside the home, in New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn. v. Bruen in 2022 — further normalizing armed self-defense in public.
Just as it had with the development of “stand your ground,” the gun itself was influencing the laws governing it. Integral to the Heller and Bruen decisions was the idea that, if a type of firearm is in “common use” — meaning a lot of people have one, say, for self-defense — possessing it is protected by the Second Amendment. Meeting that legal test is easier if more people have guns.
With favorable court rulings, coupled with the expiration of the nationwide assault weapons ban in 2004 and the passage of a 2005 law protecting gun companies from being sued for the damage their products cause, firearms sales skyrocketed. Annual domestic production and imports of AR-15-style rifles grew to 2.8 million in 2020 from 400,000 in 2006. Estimates are that privately owned guns outnumber people in the United States today, and that shootings account for roughly 40,000 deaths a year.
All of this is the backdrop for the latest expansion of “stand your ground.” With Tennessee’s “defense of property” law that took effect in July, the concept has in some ways returned to the castle from which it escaped more than century ago — or at least to the shed or barn outside. If you believe your personal property, anywhere on your land, is at risk from someone who poses a danger to you or others, you can defend it with deadly force.
Across American history, the justifications for using a gun seem to multiply, an ever-expanding terrain for legally sanctioned violence. There is one qualifier in Tennessee’s new law, however, intended to discern whether a person feels truly in danger. If you decide you must take action against an interloper, you can’t shoot the person in the back.