NYT’s Tirade About Self-Defense Shows Contempt For Constitution

The right to self-defense, most prominent in the legal doctrine of “standing your ground,” is an indisputable constitutional right. This fact, no matter how longstanding and essential to American exceptionalism, elicits much chagrin from The New York Times’ Mike McIntire, who recently argued that laws making it legally easier to protect yourself and your property are a concerning deviation from history.

“Using a Gun to Defend Yourself? The Right to Kill Is Growing,” McIntire snivels in his headline.

Corporate media are infamous for clutching pearls over Americans’ right to bear arms. The reporters who aren’t painfully ignorant about gun laws and culture work hard to shame firearm makers and mock gun freedom laws. McIntire, it appears, is no different.

Defending oneself and passing laws affirming that right, according to the reporter’s subhead, is a “distinctly American tradition.” More specifically, he asserts that “across American history, the justifications for using a gun seem to multiply, an ever-expanding terrain for legally sanctioned violence.”

McIntire, whose journalistic claim to fame is being “part of a team that obtained and published” Donald Trump’s tax returns, attempts to make his case using a recently enacted Tennessee law that recognizes threatening or responding with lethal violence to protect property from trespass, arson, burglary, robbery, and aggravated cruelty to animals can constitute reasonable deadly force. The provision also affirms protections for anyone who uses deadly force to defend “a third person” from “death, serious bodily injury, or grave sexual abuse.”

The statute includes several caveats of actions that would not be justified, including “using deadly force against another individual under this bill if the individual is facing away from the person.” McIntire does not get around to mentioning that key fact until the literal last line of his nearly 2,000-word article.

Instead, McIntire spends the majority of his ink on lamenting “a new era of defensible homicides.”

“People do not merely own more guns in America,” McIntire observes. “They now have more ways to justify using one to kill another person, simply by invoking an often inchoate sense of fear.”

He stops short of recognizing that the alternative to defending oneself in the face of a threat of serious bodily injury or death — simply staying put or fleeing — could mean just that: serious injury or death.

There’s nothing wrong and certainly nothing illegal about believing that you have a right to safeguard yourself, your family, and your castle. Guns are and will always be the great equalizer. Stewarding this right to defense well means taking gun safety and carry courses, properly storing firearms to prevent negligence-induced accidents, practicing draw and aim at a range, and learning states’ specific self-defense laws.

Contrary to what McIntire implies in his criticism of the Tennessee law, however, the lack of these best practices does not negate someone’s right to defend himself when his body, his castle, and in Tennessee, his property are under threat.

McIntire does acknowledge the principle behind stand your ground laws “is intuitive.” He takes issue, however, with states’ attempts to fine-tune those statutes to offer more legal protection to good guys with guns and even repeats the lie that self-defense laws have contributed to “homicide rates and reckless conduct” to emphasize it.

This is where McIntire’s mask slips. His problem with Tennessee’s new law might not be resistance to expanded self-defense protections or even the growing number of firearms in the U.S., which he mentions in every section of the article, but disagreement with America’s core founding principles.

“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,” McIntire wrote.

McIntire goes so far as to pretend that the Second Amendment “says nothing explicitly about an individual right to have a gun for everyday self-defense.”

“Locating that right in the Constitution became the grand project of the modern gun lobby,” McIntire confidently declares.

On the contrary, advocates of the Second Amendment have faced uphill battles at the Supreme Court and elsewhere to ensure the right to self-defense is not eradicated at the whim of gun-grabbers.

McIntire knows this. In fact, he spends paragraphs documenting the centuries-long history of American courts ditching the English concept that you must run from aggression in an effort to de-escalate. He even quotes one Indiana Supreme Court justice who said in 1877 that, “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.”

McIntire labels this concept “personal honor” and even suggests that courts’ endorsement of it communicated that “standing your ground was a crucial aspect — maybe a necessary condition — of manhood.”

Anyone who has studied American history knows that principle is not simply “honor” but personal freedom. The founders believed the right to bear arms is an essential part of the right to revolution, so much so that they were willing to die for it. Infringing on or downplaying the Second Amendment threatens the rest of our constitutional system and undermines America — ideals and people.

The “right to kill” isn’t growing, as McIntire purports in his headline. It’s always been there thanks to the Second Amendment. What is growing is the number of states that are finally taking their constitutional duty to respect, protect, and reinforce constitutional rights like the Second Amendment seriously enough to pass laws that protect law-abiding Americans from unfair prosecution if they have to defend themselves and their property.

Jordan Boyd is an award-winning staff writer at The Federalist and producer of “The Federalist Radio Hour.” Her work has also been featured in The Daily Wire, Fox News, and RealClearPolitics. Jordan graduated from Baylor University where she majored in political science and minored in journalism. Follow her on X @jordanboydtx.