There’s finally a Firearm Study That Gun Rights Supporters Can Believe

One thing everyone should always be cautious with is being too quick to support conclusions that meet your own biases. If you like what you’re seeing out of a study, take a moment to be skeptical. Bad studies are bad studies, only when they support gun rights, they’re examined far more closely than those that go the other way.

But we all know the truth. We know that guns save lives.

And now, we’ve got yet another data point to prove it thanks to a study that doesn’t actually suck.

People legally carrying concealed firearms stop more mass shootings than police do, nationally-known gun rights researcher John Lott claims.

That’s proof that Wyoming made the right decision in repealing its gun-free zones, gun rights advocate Mark Jones of Buffalo told Cowboy State Daily.

However, gun control advocate Devin Hughes of Washington, D.C., argued that Lott’s research and conclusions are flawed, and having more firearms around increases danger. 

In a recent article by Lott published in The Federalist, he claims that 51.5 % of active shootings between 2014 and 2023 were stopped by civilians with permits to carry concealed firearms. 

Police stopped 44.6% of those shootings, Lott claims. 

…

Lott’s data on stopping mass shooters, through the Crime Prevention Research Center, is more proof that eliminating gun-free zones will make Wyoming safer, Jones said.

Evidence suggests that when killers plan their shooting sprees, they frequently choose places where they know civilians won’t be armed, said Jones, national director for Gun Owners of America (GOA).

 …

Lawmakers in several other states also seem to realize that Lott is correct in his claims that armed citizens deter mass shooters and other violent criminals, Jones said.

Gun-control advocates will skew mass shooting data by including incidents such as “when two gangs are shooting at each other in the street, in a drug war,” he said.

However, “almost any way you look at the numbers, good guys with guns help deter bad guys with guns,” Jones said.

We’ve long seen that gun-free zones are really criminal empowerment zones, but with the seemingly increased frequency of mass shootings in recent years, that has also highlighted that these are the preferred targets for those planning massacres.

And why wouldn’t it be? The last thing a person planning such a thing would want is to get popped by some schmoe he thought was a target right up until the schmoe in question presents a firearm and starts dumping more than a hundred grains of attitude adjustment into him. So, he picks targets where that’s unlikely to happen.

Lott found that when they don’t, though, and decide to skip a gun-free zone, they end up being killed by armed citizens more often than by police.

In both cases, they’re killed by good guys with guns, but only one group happens to be in place when the time is right. The police might want to be. They probably want to be. They just can’t.

Armed citizens are just going about their lives, but in states with high rates of concealed carry, that means there are plenty just about everywhere they can be.

And unlike anti-gun studies, these numbers are solid. They’re not manipulated to reach a conclusion, which is why a lot of people just don’t want to talk about them, but that doesn’t change the truth.