Great article using numbers collected by the FBI regarding armed citizens at the scene of active shootings - from Concealed Carry:
Armed Citizens Are Successful 94% Of The Time At Active Shooter Events [FBI]
After seeing John Lott from the Crime Prevention Research Center publish a rebuttal to a recent FBI report on Active Shooter events I decided to dive deeper into the data and do some analysis of my own. WARNING, this is a long article/report with a lot of images but I am confident it is worth your time!
The Original FBI Data Source
The FBI has published 3 reports that collectively detail active shooter events from 2000-2017. The first report covered events from 2000 to 2013, the second covered 2014-2015, and the third and most recent covered 2016-2017.
It is important to note that the FBI has no specific system in place for finding and cataloging active shooter events. They manually search for and include them in their reports the same way anyone else might Google it which of course means there is room for error particularly in missing events that should have been included.
The FBI definition of an Active Shooter event is: “One or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area.”
It is a long article. The author - Jacob Paulsen - is being very careful to dot his i's and cross his t's. Here is a distillation of the FBI data:
18.2+75.8 = 94%
Jacob also looks at the numbers for gun free zones as opposed to guns allowed. Given a shooting incident with eight or more fatalities, these shootings occurred 77.8% in gun free zones and 16.7% in gun allowed zones with the 5.6% not having data.
Armed (and trained) citizens make the whole population much safer and gun free zones are almost five times more dangerous than zones where citizens are allowed to be armed.
The a**hole who shot up the Colorado movie theater in 2012 specifically went to that theater because it was gun free. He did not go to another theater showing the same movie closer to his house because that theater allowed armed citizens to attend.
Leave a comment