{"id":98186,"date":"2023-12-01T12:08:44","date_gmt":"2023-12-01T18:08:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=98186"},"modified":"2023-12-01T12:08:44","modified_gmt":"2023-12-01T18:08:44","slug":"98186","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=98186","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Good guys with guns save lives. Don\u2019t believe the hype.<\/a><\/p>\n

Gun control\u00a0advocates<\/a>\u00a0keep<\/a>\u00a0claiming<\/a>\u00a0that\u00a0good guys with guns are not effective at stopping mass shootings.\u00a0But it looks that way only if we rely on the news media and the government for crime data.<\/p>\n

Records of media reports that I have compiled since the\u202fbeginning of 2021<\/a> show police have noted in 33 cases in which a concealed handgun permit holder stopped what appeared to be a mass murder in the making. But few of these heroic cases have gotten national news attention.<\/p>\n

Police are very important in stopping crime, but they have a limited ability to stop attacks.<\/p>\n

\u201cA deputy in uniform has an extremely difficult job in stopping these attacks,\u201d\u00a0noted<\/a>\u00a0Kurt Hoffman, a Sarasota County, Fla sheriff. He said that mass shooters can \u201cwait for a deputy to leave the area or pick an undefended location\u201d as an advantage over police. Even with a visible police or security presence, he said, \u201cThose in uniform who can be readily identified as guards may as well be holding up neon signs saying, \u2018Shoot me first.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a good reason that air marshals\u00a0don\u2019t wear uniforms on planes<\/a>. By being inconspicuous, they prevent attackers from having a tactical advantage.<\/p>\n

My research also revealed that recent cases such as the\u202fLewiston, Maine<\/a>, and the \u202fNashville Covenant School<\/a>\u202fattacks occurred in gun-free zones where patrons are either discouraged from carrying guns or face fines and imprisonment for having them. Very few in the media have covered that fact.<\/p>\n

The Nashville police chief, who got a look at the murderer\u2019s entire manifesto, noted that the murderer originally targeted another location but\u00a0decided against that<\/a>\u00a0\u201cbecause of a threat assessment by the suspect of too much security.\u201d The Buffalo mass murderer last year wrote in his\u00a0manifesto<\/a>\u00a0that \u201careas where [concealed carry weapons] are outlawed or prohibited may be good areas of attack.\u201d<\/p>\n

My research shows it\u2019s hard to ignore the\u00a0<\/a>enormous amount of<\/a> mass public shootings that occur in places where guns are banned.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Associated Press<\/a>,\u00a0New York Times<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Washington Post\u202f<\/a>\u00a0cite\u202fFBI reports\u202fto show that legally armed civilians stopped only about 4 percent of active shooting attacks. Until January 2021, I worked in the U.S. Department of Justice as the senior adviser for research and statistics; part of my job was to\u202fevaluate<\/a>\u202fthese reports.<\/p>\n

I showed the bureau that many cases were\u202fmissing and that others had been misidentified<\/a>. Yet, the FBI continues to report that armed citizens stopped only 14 of the 302 active shooter incidents that it identified from 2014 to 2022. In fact, per my research, armed citizens stop an almost eight times higher share of attacks. And if we limit our focus to places where permit holders are allowed to carry, the rate is 11 times higher.<\/p>\n

The\u202fFBI defines active shooter incidents<\/a>\u202fas \u201cone or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area.\u201d But it does not include shootings that are deemed to be related to other criminal activity, such as robbery or fighting over drug turf. Active shootings may involve just one shot being fired at just one target, even if the target isn\u2019t hit.<\/p>\n

The FBI has\u00a0provided funding<\/a>\u00a0to Texas State University\u2019s Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training (ALERRT) Center and has partnered with its researchers to\u00a0compile lists<\/a>.\u00a0Police departments aren\u2019t generally required to collect active shooter data, so the researchers most likely had to find news stories about incidents.<\/p>\n

It isn\u2019t surprising that people will miss cases or occasionally misidentify them, though the sheer number of missing cases involving defensive gun uses is startling. The\u202fFBI was unwilling to change its figures when I pointed out my findings\u00a0when I was at the Department of Justice<\/a>\u00a0or\u00a0earlier<\/a>.<\/p>\n

My organization, the Crime Prevention Research Center, has continued this work and spent only a few thousand dollars\u00a0(compared to\u00a0millions<\/a>\u00a0spent by the FBI)\u00a0and\u00a0found an additional 138 cases, plus five more that were misclassified<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Instead of 14 of 302 active shooting attacks being stopped, we found that 157 out of 440 were stopped. That\u2019s a rate of 35.7 percent. We found a rate of 41.3 percent for 2022 cases, and that goes up still further to 63.5 percent when gun-free zones are excluded.<\/p>\n

A\u00a0recent piece<\/a>\u00a0in The Hill by gun control advocate Devin Hughes (who incorrectly calls me a \u201cformer researcher\u201d) claims that a\u00a0recent study<\/a>\u00a0I co-authored \u201cmade a startling statistical admission . . .\u00a0 no longer finding that more guns resulted in less crime.\u201d In fact, traditional fixed-effects estimates show statistically significant results. And with new difference-in-difference estimates there is a clear, statistically significant downward trend after right-to-carry laws are adopted, and looking at results only for individual years where there are fewer observations in any particular year would reach that conclusion.<\/p>\n

Most empirical studies that I\u2019ve reviewed support my original findings<\/a>. The ones that don\u2019t\u202foverwhelmingly<\/a>\u202ftake the mistaken approach of looking only at later years. They implicitly assume that the states that adopted concealed handgun laws most recently are issuing more concealed handgun permits. In fact, the earlier-adopting states are still issuing more permits than the recent adopters.<\/p>\n

A recent survey by Arthur Berg, Gary Mauser and I shows that most\u202fresearchers<\/a>\u00a0who have published peer-reviewed empirical research on gun control believe that eliminating gun-free zones and allowing people to carry concealed handguns would reduce both mass public shootings and murder.<\/p>\n

Many\u00a0<\/a>cite the National Research Council\u2019s (NRC) 2005 \u201cFirearms and Violence<\/a>\u201d report to criticize my work, but they fail to describe its findings accurately. The NRC refrained from reaching a conclusion on any of the dozens of different gun regulations it studied.<\/p>\n

In fact, it was more supportive of right-to-carry laws than any other gun law, as there was a rarely published\u00a0dissent<\/a> by the preeminent criminologist James Q. Wilson. He noted that NRC\u2019s own estimates showed that murder rates fell after states passed right-to-carry laws.<\/p>\n

Mass murderers\u2019 reasons for picking their targets should be newsworthy, and the media\u2019s blackout endangers people\u2019s safety. Given how often armed civilians stop attacks, these murderers have good reasons to avoid places where civilians can protect themselves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Good guys with guns save lives. Don\u2019t believe the hype. Gun control\u00a0advocates\u00a0keep\u00a0claiming\u00a0that\u00a0good guys with guns are not effective at stopping mass shootings.\u00a0But it looks that way only if we rely on the news media and the government for crime data. Records of media reports that I have compiled since the\u202fbeginning of 2021 show police have … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,8,29,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-98186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-editorial-o-the-day","category-rkba","category-safety","category-self-defense"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=98186"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98186\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":98187,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98186\/revisions\/98187"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=98186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=98186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=98186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}