Some critics have dubbed it “murder insurance,” but it’s colloquially known as self-defense insurance—and around two million gun-owning Americans have signed up. A report on the companies that provide subscribers low- or no-cost legal representation after incidents of violence. Plus:
Illustration by Tyler Comrie
Your First Call After You Shoot Someone
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.”
Davis carries a Smith & Wesson pistol, and at some point he pulled it out. The fight stopped, more or less; the gun had changed the dynamic. Davis put the firearm away and turned to walk back inside. Then things began to happen very quickly. “He kicked me in the ass. I kicked him in the nuts and pulled the gun again. This time he ran. And it’s dark, it’s pitch-dark. I heard a noise. I can’t see nothing,” Davis told me. “The next thing I know, the gun went off.” The moment had a cinematic air. Davis looked at the barrel of the pistol and saw smoke curling upward, as if in slow motion. Carr appeared out of the darkness saying, “You shot me.” Davis dropped to his knees to blow in Carr’s mouth and press on a wound in his torso. Carr’s wife was outside by now, screaming. The shot was fatal. (Carr’s wife couldn’t be reached for comment.)
When law enforcement showed up, Davis asked to have his hands cuffed in front of him, so as not to aggravate his bum shoulder. In the back of the cruiser, which would take him to the Guadalupe County jail, he reached his shackled hands up to his shirt pocket to slip out his phone. He dialled a number he’d never imagined using. After a few rings, a lawyer working with U.S. Law Shield answered. “I shot somebody,” Davis said. “I need help.”
