Over the past few months the Wall St. Journal has repeatedly taken aim at lawful gun ownership and the right to self-defense. In late October the paper breathlessly reported that Stand Your Ground laws are “making it easier than ever to kill someone” and get away with it, and followed up that bit of anti-gun hysteria with another piece in mid-November that specifically focused on the rising numbers of justifiable homicides in Jacksonville, Florida and insinuated that many of those cases were actually murder, not self-defense (though their evidence was scant, at best).
Now the WSJ is out with yet another attack on the right to carry. Over the weekend the paper published a piece on “The Innocent Bystanders Caught in Deadly Crossfire of Self-Defense Shootings,” using these rare and tragic events to once again bash Stand Your Ground laws, which are found in the vast majority of U.S. states.
Amid a rise in self-defense homicides across the U.S., there also has been a toll on bystanders killed by stray gunfire. Often, prosecutors don’t file homicide charges in those cases. Many grieving families, angry that nobody is being held to account for the loss of their loved one, are left to try to seek a measure of justice in civil courts.
… Gun-control advocates blame some of these bystander killings on stand-your-ground laws, which provide enhanced legal protections for people claiming self-defense in public places, and on the rise of permitless carry laws, which in many states allow almost anyone to carry a weapon in public with no required training.
“When untrained or panicked shooters miss their target, it’s children, neighbors and bystanders who pay the price,” said Nick Suplina of Everytown for Gun Safety, a nonprofit focused on gun-violence prevention. “These laws don’t deter violence, they create more of it by turning public spaces into crossfire zones where anyone can be harmed.”
WSJ reporter Mark Maremont doesn’t provide any statistics on the number of innocent bystanders who’ve been killed or injured by someone acting in lawful self-defense, nor does he offer any sort of comparison to bystanders injured or killed by police. As the Second Amendment Foundation’s Kostas Moros pointed out on X, though, even trained law enforcement officers can hit unintended targets when discharging their duty weapons.
LAPD alone struck 21 innocent bystanders in a decade.https://t.co/Br65bZg6gA
— Kostas Moros (@MorosKostas) December 8, 2025
Maremont’s story relies on several tragic incidents, some involving legal gun owners and others involving individuals who acted in lawful self-defense with a gun they illegally possessed. It’s only halfway through the story do we learn that the legal principle shielding those who use deadly force to defend themselves from charges when bystanders are shot are in place in most states and have been for a long time.
The legal grounds for shielding shooters in bystander killings is a long-established doctrine called transferred intent, experts say. If a person engaged in legitimate self-defense accidentally shoots a bystander, their intent—to defend against an assailant—is transferred to include the unintended victim.
“In general, when someone is viewed to have a valid self-defense claim, the idea is that they are justified in taking the action that they did because of an emergency situation,” said Rachel Barkow, a criminal-law professor at New York University: “So, if in the process, they accidentally kill someone else, that is not deemed to be criminal.”
Many states have enacted such provisions into statute. Others, now including Massachusetts, have cemented the protection with judicial decisions.
Barkow said the doctrine predates the stand-your-ground laws enacted in recent decades in 30 states. But, she added, “stand-your-ground will allow more people to claim self-defense than otherwise would have been able to,” creating more cases involving dead bystanders where the legal question is raised.
For some odd reason Maremont has repeatedly refused to include the eight states where no duty to retreat has been established via common law in his list of Stand Your Ground states, but that is the law in nearly 80% of the country.
Maremont also downplays the fact that in most states, the law does allow for charges to be brought against someone who acted in self-defense but harmed an innocent bystander if police or prosecutors believe they were reckless with their actions. While Maremont mentions that fact, he chose to bury it deep within his story while adding the disclaimers that those charges “typically would be for a lesser offense than murder” and “[e]ven when prosecutors bring lesser charges in such cases, they don’t always win a conviction.”
Ultimately, the WSJ piece offers no hard data to suggest that self-defense shootings where bystanders are shot are increasing, nor does he present any statistics showing that these types of defensive gun uses are more common in permitless carry states. In fact, of the three incidents Maremount covers, only one took place in a state where no permit is necessary in order for lawful gun owners to legally carry; a shooting at an Akron, Ohio gas station where a clerk who was being attacked by an irate customer drew her gun and accidentally shot another patron. In that case, the clerk was charged with the criminal offense of negligent homicide, but she was found not guilty by a jury.
Any time an innocent bystander is shot or killed by a gun owner acting in self-defense, it’s a tragedy. And there very well may be some circumstances where criminal charges are appropriate. But as Moros argues, “the blame ultimately lies on the criminal who precipitated the danger,” adding that if “the government wants to stop these incidents, it should crack down on criminals and thereby reduce the necessity of needing to fire a gun in self-defense in the first place.”
Moros also notes that homicides (which would include justifiable homicides) have been trending down at an historic pace over the past couple of years, which suggests that, as rare as these incidents are they’re also happening even more infrequently now. And keep in mind that Stand Your Ground laws have been in place for decades in most states. If those laws were really responsible for a large number of defensive gun uses where innocents were harmed, we would have seen the evidence for that long before now… and Maremont would undoubtably have included that in his report instead of relying on insinuations instead.
Editor’s Note: The radical left and their allies in the media will stop at nothing to enact their gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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