What is really the best way to stop active shooters, whether they be at a high school, university campus, mall or government building? According to the numbers, the answer is not gun free zones, but armed citizens.
A 2018 report from The Crime Prevention Research Center discovered that between 1950 and 2018 97.8% of mass public shootings have occurred in Gun Free Zones. That's up six percent since 2015.
Yes, those are the very unconstitutional laws that Communist gun confiscators have imposed unlawfully upon the people. Those laws have facilitated the criminals in their bloodlust, not guns.
However, another study shows that when armed citizens are present, they are 94% successful in either stopping or impeding active shooters.
The numbers come by way of a recent FBI report that was examined by Jacob S. Paulsen, President of ConcealedCarry.com.
In a lengthy discussion, which I highly recommend you read, Paulsen gets to the heart of the numbers, along with an infographic to help you better understand what is going on.
So the below graphic does just that. Of all the active shooter events there were 33 at which an armed citizen was present. Of those, Armed Citizens were successful at stopping the Active shooter 75.8% of the time (25 incidents) and were successful in reducing the loss of life in an additional 18.2% (6) of incidents. In only 2 of the 33 incidents (6.1%) was the Armed Citizen(s) not helpful in any way in stopping the active shooter or reducing the loss of life.Thus the headline of our report that Armed Citizens Are Successful 94% Of The Time At Active Shooter Events.
In the 2 incidents at which the armed citizen “failed” to stop or slow the active shooter, one is the previously mentioned incident with hunters. The other is an incident in which the CCWer was shot in the back in a Las Vegas Walmart when he failed to identify that there were 2 Active Shooters involved in the attack. He neglected to identify the one that shot him in the back while he was trying to ambush the other perpetrator.
We also decided to look at the breakdown of events that took place in gun free zones and the relative death toll from events in gun free zones vs non-gun-free zones.
Of the 283 incidents in our data pool, we were unable to identify if the event took place in a gun-free zone in a large number (41%) of the events. Most of the events took place at a business, church, home, or other places at which as a rule of law it is not a gun free zone but potentially could have been declared one by the property owner. Without any information in the FBI study or any indication one way or the other from the news reports, we have indicated that event with a question mark.
If you look at all of the Active Shooter events (pie chart on the top) you see that for those which we have the information, almost twice as many took place in gun free zones than not; but realistically the vast majority of those for which we have no information (indicated as ?) are probably NOT gun free zones.
If you isolate just the events at which 8 or more people were killed the data paints a different picture (pie chart on the bottom). In these incidents, 77.8% took place in a gun-free zone suggesting that gun free zones lead to a higher death rate vs active shooter events in general.
The American people need to keep this in mind when Democrats begin to push for Red Flag laws, something that is unconstitutional, leads to gun confiscation, death and President Trump has expressed approval. Any and all federal gun laws are unconstitutional. We already have laws against murder. That doesn't stop people from murdering other people any more than more unconstitutional and unlawful gun "laws." What has been proven over and over again to stop active shooters is not gun free zones, but armed citizens.
Gun free zones need to be abolished and the rights of the people once again recognized.
Also, Selwyn Duke also points out:
While counterintuitive to some, this study is not surprising. It has long been shown that there simply is no correlation between stricter gun-control laws and lower murder rates; in fact, as president of the Crime Prevention Research Center John R. Lott, Jr. has put it, it appears that more guns equals less crime. Just consider the following little-known facts:• While often portrayed as a Wild West of murder and mayhem, the United States ranks only 83rd among the world’s nations in intentional homicide rate, according to Index Mundi.
• Countries such as Russia, Mexico, and Brazil have far stricter gun laws than the United States, but also more homicide. Furthermore, as Professor Thomas Sowell wrote in 2012, “Gun ownership has been three times as high in Switzerland as in Germany, but the Swiss have had lower murder rates. Other countries with high rates of gun ownership and low murder rates include Israel, New Zealand, and Finland.”
• Great Britain has a lower homicide rate than does the United States. But the U.K. has always had a lower homicide rate — even back when both nations had few gun-control laws — and the U.K.’s gun-crime rate is higher now than it was then. Moreover, states such as New Hampshire have lower murder rates than does Britain despite having far higher gun-ownership rates. Also note that London made news this year by surpassing New York City in homicides for the first time in two centuries.
• Vermont has approximately the same gun-ownership rate as Louisiana but one-eighth the murder rate.
• Despite Japan’s very strict gun-control laws, Japanese-descent Americans living in the United States — with relatively easy access to firearms — have a murder rate half that of Japanese living in Japan.
• As Dr. Sowell also informed, the rate of gun ownership “is higher in rural areas than in urban areas, but the murder rate is higher in urban areas. The rate of gun ownership is higher among whites than among blacks, but the murder rate is higher among blacks. For the country as a whole, handgun ownership doubled in the late 20th century, while the murder rate went down.
• People over 50 are more likely to own guns than those under 50, but the latter have a higher murder rate.
The explanation? Demographics. As Sowell puts it, it’s not the guns that explain the different murder rates. It’s the people.
As for other myths, it’s often heard that guns are more likely to be used against their owners than anyone else, but this is deceptive because it includes suicides in the statistics. In fact, suicide accounts for most U.S. guns deaths, with 22,938 gun suicides in 2016 versus 14,415 gun homicides.
Here's a full infographic with all the details from Paulsen's article.
