Many Good Guys With Guns

A good guy with a gun is involved in ending one out of twelve mass shootings in recent years, according to Ted Nugent.

Just kidding. It’s according to the FBI.

And they may be under-reporting even that figure:

The FBI’s two latest reports state that there were 40 active shooter cases from 2014-15 and 50 cases from 2016-17.  During these two periods, the FBI reports that two and five shootings, respectively, were stopped by individuals with concealed handgun permits.  The two reports each describe an additional case where a permit holder was involved but wounded or killed by the attacker.
For four years, the CPRC has been collecting cases of concealed handgun permit holders stopping mass public shootings. As we will show below, permit holders saved lives in between 13 and 16 cases from 2014-17.  This includes the seven cases that the FBI lists, seven cases that should have been included (one of the seven is debatable), and two cases that the FBI had on its list but doesn’t include as instances of permit holders saving lives.  Thus, concealed handgun permit holders saved lives in 13.5% to 16.5% of 97 cases. We only started collecting these cases were permit holders stopped attacks in 2014, so a comparison is limited to the last two active shooting reports put out by the FBI.
It is entirely possible that in the two cases where a permit holder was wounded or killed by the attacker that the permit holder’s actions allowed others to escape the scene. But even assuming that was not the case, permit holders were successful between 87% and 89% of the time that they intervened.

But let’s take the FBI’s 8% figure at face value. 8% of the American people do not carry firearms. Likely no more than a fraction of that, even in gun-friendly states.

And almost all spree killings happen in gun-free zones, where nobody is supported to be carrying.

So – as the DFL tries to jam down the gun control agenda Michael Bloomberg paid them to work for here in Minnesota – where, one wonderss, on earth does “Protect” Minnesota get the idea that attazcking a spree killer, unarmed, is 20 times as effective as using a firearm?

According to a 2013 FBI study of 160 active shootings between 2000 and 2013, in only one incident was an armed civilian
able to stop the attack–and that was a US Marine– but 21 of those shootings (13%) were interrupted by unarmed civilians.
Thus, unarmed civilians are 20 times more likely to stop a rampage shooting than armed civilians.

Source: The Latest Research on Rampage Shootings Show that Gunmen Rarely Target Gun-Free Zones. Jennifer Mascia The Trace. November 30, 2016. Yes, they actually believe this crap.

Unmentioned – the ratio of successful attempts vs. fatalities for armed vs. unarmed people.

Because one might think that if attacking spree killers without weapons were a viable tactic, SWAT teams would be using it today.

One thought on “Many Good Guys With Guns

  1. Ah, yes, the beauty of cherry-picking your data to fit your conclusions.

    In Minnesota at least, any “active shooter” situation that occurred between 2000 and 2004 would have found few armed citizens available to intervene because shall-issue didn’t exist, then was invalidated, and had to be re-adopted before any significant number of permits were issued.

    In other words, civilians in those days would have barehandedly attacked armed gunmen out of desperate necessity, not out of choice. Had more permits been issued, more civilians would have been able to use firearms to intervene, which would give a different result, as indeed we’re seeing in more recent years.

    The people doing the statistics certainly know this, but the low-information voters who read the headlines on Slate suck it up regardless. Yes, they actually believe that crap.

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