The New Yorker:

In the era of Stand Your Ground, self-defense insurance is increasingly popular. Does it promote gun violence?

By Rachel Monroe

Gregory Carr and Lyman Davis were friends, more or less. They would sit around drinking and joking, and they knew each other’s families. Carr, a former rodeo clown, once took Davis to watch horses compete in wagon races—“pretty neat,” Davis told me, beaming. But at some point, the men’s relationship deteriorated. Davis, who is seventy-eight, began to think of Carr, about two decades younger than him, as a bully and a braggart. The kind of person who, when a deer was shot, wouldn’t do the hard work to track it down and finish it off. By November, 2019, Carr was living in a trailer with his wife and stepdaughter on Davis’s ranch, outside Seguin, thirty-five miles from San Antonio. The arrangement was meant to be for just a few months, but Davis quickly grew tired of it. “I don’t want anybody else here,” he said. “I bought this, I paid for it, I built every structure that’s out here.” The day before Thanksgiving, the two men went to Davis’s daughter’s house to celebrate. Davis’s grandchildren were there, and it was a lighthearted evening until, while people were crowding together for a photograph, Carr smacked Davis’s butt. It was the second time he’d done something like that, and Davis couldn’t tell what he meant by it: Was it a joke, an insult, a come-on? In any case, “I got hot,” Davis told me. “I reacted pretty bad.” He shouted at Carr, then stalked out of the house. His daughter ran after him, crying. Davis couldn’t get himself to calm down. It seemed to him that Carr was intentionally provoking him into looking like a volatile old man. “He did this to make me do what I did so my daughter and her husband would see,” he said. “And in front of the babies.”

The next evening, Carr knocked on Davis’s door. The two men exchanged words, then began to scuffle; according to Davis, Carr grabbed him by the neck and threw the first punch. Davis had been a college-football player and, later, a high-school coach. Some years earlier, he’d sent a man to the emergency room after a fistfight. But recent surgeries and injuries had left him feeling weak and winded. “For the first time in my life, I felt like I couldn’t handle myself,” he said. “At sixty-seven, I still could, but not at seventy-two.”

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