The FSU shooting is going to spark an awful lot of debate. Unsurprisingly, a lot of gun control advocates are using this to attack Florida and its relatively lax gun control scheme. They’re already pushing the narrative that universal background checks, magazine restrictions, assault weapon bans, and other items on their list of greatest hits would have stopped this awful tragedy, and they expect us to bow down and let it happen.
It’s just assumed by both them and the media that gun control would have stopped this from happening.
However, we know otherwise.
For example, we know that the alleged killer could not buy a gun of any kind lawfully in the state of Florida. He stole a gun that his mother, a police officer, purchased from work–her former duty weapon. It was a handgun, along with a shotgun, so an assault weapon ban wouldn’t have done anything, either.
The state’s red flag law also didn’t do a damn thing, either.
But on Wednesday, our own John Petrolino covered a study that shows something that would have. The study, conducted by Dr. John R. Lott, Jr, and Dr. Carlisle E. Moody, looked at armed citizens stopping active shooter situations, not unlike what happened at FSU.
From John’s piece:
Once all the data was compiled, some initial findings were observed.
“The first takeaway is, assuming our count is complete, that armed citizens have stopped more active shooter incidents than the police have, although the difference is not significantly different from zero,” Lott and Moody noted. “Also, armed citizens do not appear to interfere with the police or blunder so badly as to get their weapon taken away by the shooter or kill the wrong person.”
Moreover, one of the more significant findings was that “according to police, armed citizens have stopped 57 active shooter events which otherwise were likely to have escalated into mass public shootings – where ‘many’ people risked being murdered.”
The rates at which citizens vs police affect the number of people killed during an active shooting event have a rather large chasm. The study noted that “armed citizens reduce [emphasis added] the number of people killed by 49 percent while the police increase [emphasis added] the number killed by 16 percent in comparison to the omitted class (shooters who are arrested later or stopped by unarmed citizens or stop of their own accord).”
Beyond casualty rates, instances of injury are also lower in the civilian response category: “Armed citizens reduce the number of people wounded in active shooter incidents by 41 percent while the police have no significant effect.”
Now, Florida is an ostensibly pro-gun state. However, I’ve referred to it as the most restrictive pro-gun state in the nation. The aforementioned age limit is one of the reasons why I say that. They also do not have open carry.
Also lacking, though, are anything like armed teachers or campus carry for students old enough to carry a firearm.
Defensive gun uses stop active shooters a significant percentage of the time. Had one armed citizen been in the FSU student union building on Thursday, we might well be having a very different conversation today.
While anti-gunners are out there beating the drum for gun control, arguing that Florida needs scads of new regulations that had nothing to do with this horrific incident, the truth is that we know exactly what could have stopped this attack. We know that guns save lives.
Gun control failed here. It failed spectacularly, even the post-Parkland regulations that were specifically passed to stop someone like this alleged killer failed.
But one armed citizen could have made the difference.
This is why my response to every person saying we could have stopped this by passing X, Y, or Z gun law is to point out that we try to stop it, but chuckleheads like the speaker keep blocking things like campus carry and armed teachers.
I say it because, with this study, we know it to be true.
Read the full article here
