The shooting in a bar in Austin last weekend rocked the city, to be sure, but police responded ridiculously fast to the incident. Reports say the response time was just 57 seconds. That's unreal, but it wasn't enough to stop the attack from the jump.
For that, we need armed citizens, because we know definitively that they stop mass attacks faster.
I know the anti-gunners claim otherwise, but the truth doesn't really care about their feelings, nor how they cook the books to make it look like they are.
A crime study from John Lott, founder and president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, and Carlisle E. Moody, professor of economics, emeritus with the College of William and Mary, indicates that armed citizens are better at stopping mass killers than the police.
This data runs counter to mainstream-news narratives.
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Some key takeaways from this research paper include:
- Armed citizens reduce the number of victims wounded in active shooter incidents by 2.7-5.2 while the police have no significant effect.
- Armed citizens reduce the number of casualties by 5.6-8.8 while police response results in a small increase that is significantly different from zero at the .10 level in three out of four models.
- The number of victims killed, wounded, or the total number of casualties is significantly reduced if armed citizens stop the attack compared to the situation where the police stop the attack.
- With respect to unfortunate mishaps, Table 2 shows that armed citizens have shot the wrong person once while police officers have shot the wrong person four times, including friendly fire.
Lott and Moody hypothesize that armed citizens stop active murderers with fewer casualties than police because they have a tactical advantage. Uniformed police officers typically get a scene after a murderer has started shooting people. The responding officers can then be targeted because they stand out. In contrast, anyone could be an armed civilian. They blend in and are more likely to already be at the scene.
The problem we tend to see with the anti-gun numbers is that they don't count it unless it's already at the threshold for a mass shooting. Strangely, this often ignores the Gun Violence Archive definition of a mass shooting, where three or more people are merely shot, versus being killed, as most other databases require, but that is, I'm sure, completely innocent and not at all a means of trying to pump up their data to mean what they want it to mean.
Anti-gun researchers would never do that, now would they?
Anywho, the definitions they use matter because, when there's an armed citizen present, they often stop the attack before it gets to the typical level to be counted as a mass shooting, particularly by the definitions chosen by researchers.
So, it looks to them and their buddies in the media that armed citizens don't do much.
The truth is quite different, as I've already noted. Let's be honest here, if any of us are in a restaurant or church and someone comes in to start killing people, are we going to wait for them to kill three or four people just so we can make a political point? Hell no.
Eli Dicken took out the Greenwood Park Mall shooter after he hit that threshold, but that was because he wasn't right there when it started.
The truth is that armed citizens are the most effective means of combating mass shootings, and that includes terrorist attacks like the bar in Austin last weekend. When a jihadi decides it's time to meet his 72 virgins, we can't count on the police being just 57 seconds away, and even if we could, bullets fly much faster than that.
