Analysis of selected armed civilians’ engagements against active killers
Mainstream media often mock the idea of armed civilians going up against active killers. Zbrojnice.com has an entire category of articles that are dedicated to describing engagements of individual armed civilians against wannabe mass murderers. This analysis summarizes the most important data that we can gain from these cases.
Zbrojnice.com is a Czech language website that deals with practical, legal, cultural and social issues of civilian firearms ownership. This article was translated to English from Czech original.
Česká verze článku: Analýza: Vybrané zásahy ozbrojených civilistů proti aktivním vrahům
Introductory note
Let’s start with a summary of information that is well known to zbrojnice.com readers already.
- According to FBI statistics, armed civilians were successful in 94 percent of engagements with active shooters. They stopped the perpetrator in 76 percent of cases and helped to mitigate loss of life in a further 18 percent (note: list below includes also cases of police officers being rescued /defended by armed civilian in situations that do not fit the FBI active killer definition).
- Presence of an armed defender at the site of the attack is crucial for mitigating the number of casualties, regardless of whether that person is civilian or a member of law enforcement.
- Legislation in most countries of the world prevents law abiding civilians from carrying, and often merely owning, firearms for protection. That applies to most of Europe, large parts of the United States including California and most other countries including Latin American ones with extremely high murder rates (Venezuela, Mexico, Brasil).
- Restrictive firearms legislation doesn’t affect perpetrators’ ability to commit an attack. All recent terror attacks in the European Union were committed with illegal firearms that were mostly smuggled in from the Balkans. Quite often not only the firearms but also the perpetrators were in the EU illegally, as was the case with the Bataclan terror attack.
Select engagements of armed civilians against active killers
Link is to a big picture.
The list below includes basic information about armed civilian engagements of active killers that were described in detail within dedicated articles on zbrojnice.com (please use Google Translate to read those). These incidents include most of the cases listed in FBI “active shooter yearbooks” as well as some other cases from outside the US.
