We identified and analyzed 60 of them, and one striking pattern in the data is this: In not a single case was the killing stopped by a civilian using a gun. Moreover, we found that the rate of mass shootings has increased in recent years—at a time when America has been flooded with millions of additional firearms and a barrage of new laws has made it easier than ever to carry them in public. And in recent rampages in which armed civilians attempted to intervene, they not only failed to stop the shooter but also were gravely wounded or killed. . . .Unlike Mother Jones, Media Matters references my op-ed in the New York Daily News. In the first paragraph of my piece I made this point:
Friday’s horrible shooting in Colorado occurred in yet another place where guns are banned. And that’s consistent with a trend: With a single exception, every multiple-victim public shooting in the U.S. in which more than three people have been killed since at least 1950 has taken place where citizens are not allowed to carry their own firearms. . . .The key is that Mother Jones defined multiple victim public shootings as occurring where "The shooter took the lives of at least four people." Now take the two points together. Mother Jones' claim that "In not a single case was the killing stopped by a civilian using a gun" is actually quite consistent with my point. If they had read the first paragraph of my article, the reason that they couldn't find civilian defensive gun uses stopping the attacks should have been obvious: they only looked at cases where more than three people have been killed (or as Mother Jones says "at least four people") and I pointed out that all but one of those cases took place where permitted concealed handguns were banned.
Not only do these mass public killers avoid these places where guns are allowed like the plague, even when attacks occur in places where permitted concealed handguns are allowed they don't meet the criteria that at least four are killed because people with guns stop the attacks.
Indeed, since Mother Jones focuses so much on the Aurora, Colorado case, I should mention again that out of the seven movie theaters within a twenty minute drive of the killer's home that were showing "The Dark Knight Rises" movie, only one posted a sign banning permitted concealed handguns (see pp. 14-17). It wasn't the theater closest to the killer's apartment and it wasn't the largest theater.
The article also focuses on the Sikh Temple and make a big deal of the fact: "During that time, the state issued a whopping 122,506 permits, according to data from Wisconsin's Department of Justice." But again it is useful to know that the Temple also banned guns.
The very fact that Mother Jones ignores the entire notion of gun bans speaks volumes.
Media Matters tries to question the claims of the defensive gun uses that I raised in my New York Daily News op-ed.
In an op-ed for The New York Daily News published that same day, John Lott commented on the Aurora shooting by writing, "If one of the hundreds of people at the theater had a concealed handgun, possibly the attack would have ended like the shooting at the mega New Life Church in Colorado Springs in December 2007."(The incident described by Lott at New Life Church involved a former police officer, who was serving as a volunteer security guard, wounding a man who fatally shot two people in the church parking lot. The man subsequently committed suicide.) . . .What is ignored in the Media Matters account is that Jeanne Assam was able to carry the gun at the New Life Church because she had a permit and as I noted in the New York Daily News piece: "the church’s minister had given Jeanne Assam permission to carry her concealed handgun." Assam's former husband was a threat so she had gotten herself a concealed handgun permit. Because of this threat Assam had asked the church's minister for permission to carry the handgun with her at church and the minister said she could do it and he would just call her a volunteer security guard. Yes, Assam was a former Chicago police officer, as I have written previously, but it was the concealed handgun permit that allowed her to carry the gun with her in Colorado.
Media Matters also mentions other cases:
Gun rights die-hards frequently credit the end of a rampage in 2002 at the Appalachian School of Law in Virginia to armed "students" who intervened—while failing to disclose that those students were also current and former law enforcement officers, and that the killer, according to police investigators, was out of ammo by the time they got to him. . . .Well, I have mentioned that Mikael Gross and Tracy Bridges were former deputy sheriffs from North Carolina. I have interviewed both of them and traveled down to visit the school, and they were in law enforcement for just a couple or a few years. Again, both had concealed handgun permits from Virginia, the state where the law school is located. The Washington Post notes that prosecutors used Mikael Gross to testify at the preliminary hearing. The article by Josh White notes: ". . . Odighizuwa accepted responsibility for the shootings that began after school officials told him that he was failing out of the program. On Jan. 16, 2002, he took a .380-caliber pistol to the offices of Dean L. Anthony Sutin and Prof. Thomas Blackwell and killed them before opening fire on a crowd, killing student Angela Dales, 33, and wounding three others. Odighizuwa was subdued without incident by armed students. . . ."
I am not going to waste my time on their assertion that the rate of shootings has been increasing since I have already dealt with this type of issue before in my research, but I will point out that the key is that these attacks keep occurring where guns are banned. Even in states where permitted concealed handguns are allowed, the attacks keep occurring in the few places within the states where concealed handguns are banned. Given that right-to-carry states allow permitted concealed handguns in the vast majority of places, if Mother Jones and Media Matters were correct, simple randomness would imply that most of these attacks should be in places that allow permitted concealed handguns. Yet, that is not even remotely close to being true.
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