New York Times investigative reporter Mike McIntire has a new book to sell, and he is going all out in pitching it to lefties. McIntire recently compared U.S. “gun culture” (as if there’s a monoculture of gun owners among the 100 million Americans who possess firearms) to the “late-stage Roman Empire” in its decadence because of the rise of high-end shooting ranges and gun clubs. Now McIntire’s out with a new column in the friendly pages of the New York Times magazine claiming that the “right to kill” is expanding; a column adapted from his new book “Ricochet: Guns, Greed, and the American Way of Violence.”
McIntire’s piece starts with his description of a bill recently approved by Tennessee lawmakers, which he says makes it easier to legally 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.
I wrote about this Tennessee law back in April, so I’m more familiar with it than most of his readers. And despite McIntire’s assertion that this law somehow expands the right to self-defense to include defense of property, the folks at the Tennessee Firearms Association say the legislation doesn’t change much at all in state law. The bill supposedly expands the use of deadly force under certain conditions to prevent arson; burglary; robbery; aggravated cruelty to animals; and grave sexual abuse. But as McIntire himself mentioned, there must still be a reasonable belief that a life is in danger before deadly force is justified. As the TFA complained months ago:
Despite being framed as a “protection of property” measure, the statute, as amended in 2026, expressly prohibits the use of deadly force unless there is an imminent threat of death, serious bodily injury, or grave sexual abuse to a human being, or on circumstances where lesser force would expose a person to those same risks. In practical effect, the amendment does not create an independent right to use deadly force to defend property. Although the 2026 Amendment has new language suggesting an expansion of the affirmative defense of using force to defend property, it does not do that. The 2026 Amendment contains essentially the same person-centered threshold of imminent threat to a human that already governs Tennessee self-defense law under Tenn. Code Ann. § 39-11-611. Once the rhetoric is stripped away, the amendment appears to have changed nothing – nothing other than potentially misleading the public and tricking them into making choices for which the consequences are felony charges.
The defect in the legislation is that it was clearly filed and marketed as a property-rights reform. However, as enacted, it entirely denies property owners the ability to rely on deadly force to protect property unless the facts independently amount to a classic self-defense scenario.
So, McIntire’s first bit of evidence that the “right to kill” in self-defense is expanding is a big, juicy nothingburger. What about his other examples? He doesn’t really have any, other than perhaps this:
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.
Is the idea that you have the right to shoot back if someone is shooting at you really all that controversial? Johnson dropped second-degree murder charges against two individuals because the investigation showed they did not shoot first. It’s worth noting that the two men who were originally accused of murder ended up taking plea deals to lesser charges and were sentenced to two years in prison. Lyndell Mays, who prosecutors say did fire first, is still facing second-degree murder charges.
It’s also worth noting that there are only about a dozen states that impose a duty to retreat before acting in self-defense. Even in states like California, where Stand Your Ground can’t be found in statute, the courts have ruled that there is no general duty to retreat before defending your life. This is hardly a new concept, nor is it one that was created by the gun lobby. As McIntire himself notes, way back in 1895 the U.S. Supreme Court “established a common law right to stand one’s ground against an aggressor in public spaces.”
McIntire calls that “a seismic break from Western tradition, which had previously applied the concept only in the context of defending oneself at home,” but it seems to me more of a common sense application of the same principle at play with the Castle Doctrine.
Not McIntire, though. Oh no, he actually tries to argue that rulings like that “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.
McIntire is just rewriting history at this point and ignoring the plethora of laws, legislation, and public statements from even before the ratification of the Second Amendment that point to an individual right to keep and bear arms unconnected to service in a militia.
Any investigative journalist who really bothered to investigate the history of gun ownership in the United States would come to the undeniable conclusion that the most commonly held position throughout our history is that it is a right, not a privilege.
Despite McIntire’s best efforts, you won’t find Ricochet on the New York Times best seller list. It’s currently ranked 35,275 on Amazon’s Kindle store, which isn’t exactly a strong showing either. I guess the one silver lining about McIntire’s one-sided take on guns and gun ownership is that there won’t be too many people falling for his schtick, since hardly anyone seems to be reading it.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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