In a perfect world, we'd not have gun-free zones.
While I'm OK with a business saying no guns permitted on their premises--if they don't like my gun, then I don't like giving them my money--in that perfect world, that wouldn't happen, nor would there be areas owned by the city, county, state, or federal governments that were off-limits for me while armed.
But we don't live in a perfect world. We're stuck with this one, and in this one, there are gun-free zones.
And while anti-gunners love them, they're not the only ones.
Gun-free zones are often promoted as a “commonsense” way to keep people safe. As a veteran attorney who has spent a career at the frontline of our legal system, I am here to tell you that claim is a deadly fraud. How could any sane person think it is acceptable to deny a victim of violent crime their only chance for survival? My perspective is shaped by a sobering reality: I have spent decades in the courtroom observing the dark mechanics of the criminal mind. I never saw a perpetrator who was looking for a fair fight. Every criminal I encountered in the justice system shared a common trait—they were looking for an advantage. They planned their lawlessness around the certainty of zero resistance, specifically targeting those they knew were defenseless because they, too, wanted to ensure they went home at the end of the day.
When a school board or a business mandates a gun-free zone, they aren’t voting for safety; they are signaling to the most predatory among us that their targets have been stripped of their means of survival. They aren’t legislating peace; they are mandating helplessness and, ultimately, inviting funerals.
The Evidence: Lott’s Research and the “Magnet Effect”
The research from John Lott and the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) is unequivocal: Since 1950, over 98% of U.S. mass public shootings have occurred in gun-free zones. Through 2025, the data remains steady: 97.8% of incidents took place where civilian carry is banned.
To a predatory killer, a “Gun-Free Zone” sign isn’t a deterrent; it’s an invitation. It signals a high-density area of defenseless targets. This is the Magnet Effect: the statistical reality that mass shooters bypass harder targets in favor of “soft targets” where they know the law-abiding have been forced to disarm. Criminals act rationally. They deliberately select locations where they can maximize casualties with minimal resistance, even when the planned intent of their final shot is their own suicide. They aren’t afraid of the police arriving in ten minutes; they are afraid of the defender who is already in the room.
People forget that a lot of mass killers have no interest in surviving the encounter. This is a suicide plan for them. They want to die. They just want to vent their rage on the entire world before they do, with a massive body count that will make their name live on in infamy.
The police arriving in five or ten minutes, if not longer, isn't really a deterrent for them. They can kill a whole lot of people in that time, and we all know it.
But when there's an armed citizen there, he can react immediately.
Look at what happened at the church in White Settlement, Texas, or in the Greenwood Park Mall.
A killer thought he could amass a body count, and was killed before he could, all because a good guy with a gun was right there.
Anti-gunners like to claim that the armed citizen stopping a mass killing is a myth. To "prove" this, they point out how many mass killings have been stopped by armed citizens, but they ignore the orders of magnitude more that never reach the level to be called a mass killing because there was an armed citizen.
When someone is looking for a target, what they want is those valuable minutes where they can do as they wish without the police around and where they'll be safe and sound as they slaughter the innocent.
That's the Magnet Effect mentioned above, and when anti-gunners talk about "common sense," this is what they should be talking about. Common sense is that a place where a killer won't be confronted with armed resistance will be attractive to those who want to kill people.
Unfortunately, common sense is so uncommon these days that it damn near qualifies as a superpower. Instead, the term is misused and abused to mean "anything we think we can sell easily to a gullible public that's misled by a compliant media."
Gun-free zones might as well be baited fields for mass killers.
But that compliant media I just mentioned takes that in stupid directions in order to sell them. While I never watched the show, a friend recounted something from the TV version of Taken. The good guy is about to go into a gun-free zone and leaves his firearm behind. An ally asks if he's good with being unarmed in there, and he quips something along the lines of it's fine, because everyone else in there is unarmed.
Uh...I know a lot of people who ignore gun-free zone signs simply because they'd rather be tried by 12 than carried by six. That sign isn't a magic talisman that wards off firearms, but that wasn't what the writers of that show think.
Or, perhaps more sinisterly, that's not what they want you to think.
The only ones who benefit from gun-free zones are the killers.
Well, them and the anti-gunners who ignore how gun-free zones fail to keep people safe and just start pushing for the next thing.
