The way of the gun

The National Rifle Association and its allies daydream of a nation in which countless good guys with guns are armed to counter whichever bad guys dare draw their weapons and prepare to pull the trigger. The purest expression of that cartoon: the “stand your ground” law Florida passed in 2005.

Rather than putting the legal burden on individuals to retreat when confronted by a threat, except when provably necessary for self-defense, the law extends the “castle doctrine” that applies during a home invasion out into the world.

It’s Wild West crazy. And, as a recently released study in the Journal of American Medicine explains, deadly, too.

Looking at Florida over the course of 10 years since then-Gov. Jeb Bush signed one of the country’s broadest stand-your-ground laws in 2005, authors David Humphreys, Antonio Gasparrini and Douglas Wiebe found “monthly rates of homicide are up by 24% and monthly rates of homicide by firearm up nearly 32% — even as homicides continued falling nationwide.”

The increase was spread across all demographics. Which is part of the reason Florida’s homicide rate stands at 5.1 per 100,000 people, well above New York’s 3.1.

The authors confess to caveats. They didn’t disentangle other unique circumstances that may be at play in Florida, nor did they assess whether the law prevented other crimes.

Those are questions we could actually answer if congressional Republicans ended senseless restrictions on Centers for Disease Control-funded gun violence research.

Which will never, ever happen in the government we’re about to get — of, by and for the gun lobby.