An employee puts a weapon on display at the National Armory gun store in Pompano Beach, Florida. Credit: Joe Raedle/Getty

So-called “stand your ground” laws are associated with hundreds of additional homicides each year in the United States, according to new research conducted by public health scholars, who say that these laws “should be reconsidered to prevent unnecessary violent deaths.”

Published Monday in “JAMA Network Open,” a peer-reviewed medical journal, the study compares homicide trends in roughly two dozen states that enacted stand-your-ground (SYG) laws between 2000 and 2016 with patterns from 18 states that didn’t have such laws during the study period.

Researchers found that SYG laws were associated with an “abrupt and sustained” 8% to 11% national increase in monthly firearm homicide rates, causing an extra 58 to 72 deaths per month. “This monthly increase alone exceeds total rates of homicides in most Northern and Western European countries today,” wrote the authors.

The enactment of SYG laws contributed to an especially pronounced rise in firearm homicide rates in many Southern states that were quick to adopt the laws, with upticks ranging […]

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