Update 2-16-18: The latest school shooting incident in Parkland, Florida, exemplifies exactly the two big-ticket things this article demonstrates: (1) we have a leak in the background check process that allows crazy people to get guns legally, and (2) we are utterly failing to defend adequately our gun-free zones. If you wish the lost kids' lives to have any lasting meaning, then do something about those two problems!
Update 7-9-16: It is too early to have the facts about the mass shooting of police officers in Dallas. My hunch is that extremized politics-of-race and more-than-a-little-craziness both played roles. We'll see, soon enough. When we do know, I'll add it to the database.
Meanwhile, my article stands, just as it is, just below. I do not see sanity in spending the effort and resources doing things that demonstrably produce little or no benefit. I prefer to consult the actual data for suggestions as to what might produce large beneficial effects.
Update 7-14-16: Preliminary data suggest my hunch was exactly correct.
Update 7-5-17: The recent attempt at a mass shooting of Republican congressmen at a baseball practice proves EXACTLY my point made in this article about defending the gun-free zones that you declare. There are perfectly good reasons to have such gun-free zones, but they are sitting-duck targets if left undefended! In this case, there were two armed and qualified peace officers right on the site. The only death was the gunman. QED.
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Every time there is a mass shooting incident, there are calls for stricter gun control, and disappointment when nothing effective is done. Few agree on exactly what to do.
Update 7-9-16: It is too early to have the facts about the mass shooting of police officers in Dallas. My hunch is that extremized politics-of-race and more-than-a-little-craziness both played roles. We'll see, soon enough. When we do know, I'll add it to the database.
Meanwhile, my article stands, just as it is, just below. I do not see sanity in spending the effort and resources doing things that demonstrably produce little or no benefit. I prefer to consult the actual data for suggestions as to what might produce large beneficial effects.
Update 7-14-16: Preliminary data suggest my hunch was exactly correct.
Update 7-5-17: The recent attempt at a mass shooting of Republican congressmen at a baseball practice proves EXACTLY my point made in this article about defending the gun-free zones that you declare. There are perfectly good reasons to have such gun-free zones, but they are sitting-duck targets if left undefended! In this case, there were two armed and qualified peace officers right on the site. The only death was the gunman. QED.
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Every time there is a mass shooting incident, there are calls for stricter gun control, and disappointment when nothing effective is done. Few agree on exactly what to do.
This time is no different:
the Senate just voted down 4 proposed gun control bills offered only
days after the Orlando bar incident. As
well they should, nothing effective or
fair could possibly be worked out that quickly.
Better no change than the wrong one,
because they are so hard to undo.
If one gets control of one’s emotions and takes a very hard
look at the data, one can easily see
that most gun control proposals beyond what we already have in place would be
quite ineffective. In point of
fact, places where access to firearms is
very restricted actually have higher rates of violent crime. That is because the “bad guys”, who scoff at laws restricting access to weapons, enjoy a plethora of sitting-duck targets in
those venues. So, too,
do the terrorists in Europe.
The Real Data
I found an excellent database of US mass shooting incidents
available from motherjones.com as a downloadable spreadsheet, which goes back 3 decades. It is too large to republish here, so I abstracted from it the bare essentials
of all incidents with a 10 or more death toll,
plus two other incidents that didn’t have that high a death toll, but are nonetheless infamous.
I added to my short list whether or not religious or
political extremism played a role. I
specifically included whether the shooter was known to have mental
problems, although sometimes this took
looking through the detailed notes to determine this. The motherjones data included whether the
weapons were obtained legally or not.
I did not include weapon type: most were semi-automatic. Only some were so-called “assault”
weapons, some were not even
semi-automatic.
The short list data follows.
I highlighted yellow the cases where the shooter was known to be crazy
and still got weapons legally. I
highlighted green those few cases where a religious or political extremist got
their guns legally. I highlighted orange
those cases where the incident took place in an undefended gun-free zone.
Conclusions
If you follow the highlight colors, the proper responses jump right off the page
at you. They have little to do with
most gun control proposals. Truth may be
painful, but it sets you free.
We have a serious mental issues leak in our background check
system, as the yellow highlights
indicate so very clearly. People known
beforehand to have mental problems are getting guns legally. This is because the background check is a
go/no-go gate based a court judgment of insanity.
None of these shooters met that standard. Fix that,
and half the incidents in the table go away. That’s worth the effort to address.
How about a tiered response, where unease on the part of the seller
triggers a real investigation by a real law enforcement person, and not just a paper records search for a
court judgment? Columbine, and Red Lake,
might have been prevented by
that. Probably not Newtown, where the shooter killed his own mother to
get her guns for his spree.
Religious and political extremism is starting to come to America. That’s the two green highlights in the
table. This is what Senator Cornyn’s FBI
watch list proposal (that was voted down) was intended to address. This isn’t a big problem yet, but if Europe is a guide, it will be,
soon.
The orange highlighting shows the dominant problem, the one nobody wants to face. That is the inadequately-defended gun free
zone, the sitting-duck target. This is the common element in nearly every
single incident, regardless of whether
caused by mental issues or extremism.
The two exceptions not highlighted are government facilities, but it was unclear to me whether those areas were actually
open to the public.
My point is that if these victims hadn’t been sitting ducks, they probably would be alive today. The lesson is quite clear: gun free zones (and there are good reasons to
have them) must be defended.
The Most Important
Recommendations
What constitutes an adequately and properly defended gun
free zone has been known since the 19th century American frontier
towns. There are only two requirements: (1) you need a properly trained peace officer
as your guard, and (2) he must be able
to respond within about 60 seconds.
About requirement (1):
anyone called upon to defend a gun-free zone against attackers will have
to do the job of a peace officer.
Therefore peace officer training is required. Concealed-carry training is not peace officer
training. Period.
About requirement (2):
this was demonstrated in frontier towns that went gun-free, for over 50 years. Those were small towns geographically: a deputy at a dog trot could reach anywhere
in town in 60 seconds or less. When the
towns grew, longer response proved
inadequate: more died.
What that means today is twofold: (1) you need one or more guards qualified as
peace officers on your gun-free zone site,
and (2) these guards must be able to reach anywhere in the site within
60 seconds. I doubt we need any federal laws
about how exactly to do this, that
should be determined locally, since every
region is different. But those two broad
requirements could usefully be federal.
Popular knee-jerk things like clip size limits and “assault”
weapon bans won’t do any significant good.
A tiered response to mental issues,
and a proper defense of gun-free zones would obviously do a lot of good
right now. Using the FBI watch list to
slow-up gun acquisition by the amateur class of religious or political
extremists might soon be something that could help, although real terrorists will get them illegally, just like real criminals.
But if you defend your gun-free zones, the terrorists will have to look for other targets! That's the big effect here.
But if you defend your gun-free zones, the terrorists will have to look for other targets! That's the big effect here.
About Weapon Types
I didn’t include weapon types in my abstracted data. Most of these were semi-automatic
weapons, some of those the so-called “assault”
weapons like the AR-15. A few were not
even semi-automatic.
Semi-automatic is a World War 2 technology (M-1 Garand and
M-1 Carbine). No modern soldier would
live long in battle with an AR-15 instead of the fully-automatic look-alike
M-16 (a real machine gun).
Calling semi-automatic weapons “assault weapons” just
because they resemble machine guns is nonsense,
and usually indicates either a gun control political agenda or utter
ignorance about firearms.
Conclusion (as an update 7-4-16):
I offer these things which might actually help (dealing with the mental issues background check leak and the sitting-duck undefended gun free zones) as truly data-driven, and therefore very probably worthwhile to do.
Most of the other knee-jerk proposals are demonstrably ineffective at best, and we know this, because we've already tried them. Why waste the effort to do them again?
Spend your effort and your resources on something that might actually work, to do otherwise is insanely stupid.
Conclusion (as an update 7-4-16):
I offer these things which might actually help (dealing with the mental issues background check leak and the sitting-duck undefended gun free zones) as truly data-driven, and therefore very probably worthwhile to do.
Most of the other knee-jerk proposals are demonstrably ineffective at best, and we know this, because we've already tried them. Why waste the effort to do them again?
Spend your effort and your resources on something that might actually work, to do otherwise is insanely stupid.
Gun Articles as of
6-21-16 (this one
highlighted):
6-21-16 What the Gun Violence
Data Really Say
10-7-15 Oregon Mass Shooting and Gun Control
5-31-14 On Calls for More Gun Control
10-1-13 Government Shutdown, Default!
Again? No!!!
9-20-13 More Gun Control? No Way!
2-5-13 Real Problems with the Proposed
Gun Control Legislation Items
12-20-12 On the Tragedy in Connecticut
12-14-12 School Shooting in Connecticut
8-9-12 Mass Murder Shooters and Gun
Control
1-13-11 On
the Shooting Rampage in Tucson
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