Stand Your Ground Law Trends

One concern with stand your ground law research is that people are unaware of the law. Here in Massachusetts, a large number of people are unfamiliar with the law. Among people who know about the law, a large number know about Florida and Texas, but are unaware of the other states. Let’s take a look at the Google Trends data related to it.

The last states to pass the law are Wyoming and Idaho and the law was signed on 7-1-2018 in both of these states. Last five years’ Google Trends data for the keyword “stand your ground” shows that the search peaked between July 22 and July 28 in 2018.

The other two states that passed this law during this time period are Iowa (7-1-2017) and Utah (5-8-2018), but the trends data for these two states don’t reflect much increased interests after these events. When we look at the number of searches by the state, though, We can see that there are plenty of searches coming out of Iowa, but not many from Utah.

If we extend the timeline all the way back to January 2004, however, the spike in 2018 is dwarfed by the large increase in July 2013. Background information indicates that it might be associated with the Trayvon Martin shooting in Florida, when George Zimmerman was acquitted by the jury on July 13, 2013.

The increase before the big spike was possibly a result of national coverage of the case. The actual killing happened on February 26th and national coverage started on March 7, 2012.

Even prior to this incident, there is a small increase in October 2005, which is probably correlated with the enactment of the stand your ground law in Florida.

Therefore, I would like to claim that people generally have a good knowledge of the law if they live in the states where the law was enacted.