TTAG: Gun Free Zones Kill

Rob Morse, writing at The Truth About Guns, delves into John Lott's latest research on how the FBI undercounts the effectiveness of armed civilians at preventing mass murders. In doing so, he found some other data to be interesting including that mass murderers are attracted to gun free zones like flies to stink:

    The FBI reported that there were 302 mass murders from 2014 to 2022. The FBI only recognized 14 cases in which a citizen, who was not an on-duty law enforcement officer or a security guard, stopped the attack. Fortunately for us, economist John Lott has decided to dig a little deeper into the numbers. The truth that Lott uncovered should profoundly change the discussion about public violence.

    Lott found examples of attempted mass murders that the FBI either missed or ignored. According to his research, ordinary citizens stopped mass murder 157 times, or 35.7% percent of the time. He also looked at where those attacks took place.

    We can’t expect ordinary citizens to defend the public when those ordinary citizens are disarmed by law. Lott looked to see if the attacks he studied occurred in a so called “gun-free zone.” Two remarkable things leap out when you look at whether an attack happened in a gun-free zone.

    First, Lott found that mass murderers attacked gun-free zones about 98-percent of the time. That explains why honest citizens didn’t stop those murderers. Law-abiding gun owners were disarmed by plastic signs that the killers walked right past. The horrific death toll wasn’t because the murderers had a weapon that was extraordinarily lethal. The high body counts were because none of the victims had a tool to defend themselves. Politicians and corporate risk managers created environments full of disarmed victims.

    Second, armed citizens usually stop mass murderers when attack occur in places where ordinary citizens are allowed to arm themselves. There, “the percentage of active shootings that were stopped is 51%.” In 2021 that figure rose to 58 percent, and to a remarkable 63.5 percent in 2022.

    Stop for a moment to let that sink in. The mass murderer gets to choose the time, the place, and the means of his attack. Despite those advantages, armed citizens stop them almost two-thirds of the time when we’re allowed to defend ourselves.

    It turns out that mass murder is much harder to carry out when any of the victims are armed.

(Bold in the original). Also, remembering that there are lies, damned lies, and statistics, pay attention to his discussion of what constitutes a "mass murder" and what is excluded--including crimes associated with gangs and serial killers, which is probably why they tend to skew toward white perpetrators. So a Muslim shooting a bunch of people at a gay nightclub would probably count as a mass murder, but the St. Valentine's Day Massacre probably would not because it was a gang hit.