The Truth About Armed Citizens in America

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The Truth About Armed Citizens in America
by CHARLES C. W. COOKE November 28, 2022

There’s a peculiar mismatch between the number of times one reads in the newspaper that an armed citizen has prevented a mass shooting and the number of times such incidents make it into the public record—and, in turn, into the public’s perception about the role that concealed carriers play in America.

When, last July, a man named Elisjsha Dicken heroically stopped a murderer in a mall in Indiana, the corporate media outlets that reported on it were quick to reassure their readers that such things “never happen” or “rarely happen,” and to insist—even in the face of a story that flatly contradicted the claim—that, whatever might just have happened, “average citizens with handguns” usually have little chance of making a difference. In the course of telling Dicken’s story, the Associated Press bluntly proposed that his intervention represented “a rare occurrence of someone stepping in to try to prevent multiple casualties before police could arrive.” This line was echoed, almost verbatim, by The Washington Post, which called it “one of the rare instances of an armed civilian successfully intervening to end a mass shooting.” Also, CNN submitted that examples of “an armed bystander attacking an active shooter are rare” and Reuters said “it is rare for a bystander to stop an ‘active shooter’ attack in the United States.”

This talking point, of course, comes straight from the anti-gun group Giffords, which has a whole section on its website devoted to the idea that the notion of “a good guy with a gun” is a myth.

What Elisjsha Dicken did in Indiana was notable for its remarkable rapidity and skill—impressively, Dicken took down the murderer within 15 seconds, at a range of 120 feet, with a 9 mm pistol—but it was certainly not that unusual. As John Lott Jr. has noted—using publicly available reports from newspapers and media outlets—as this was being written, thus far in 2022, bystanders stopped at least seven mass murderers. (Lott deliberately separates mass murders from other crimes that have been prevented by concealed carriers.)

In addition to the incident in Indiana, there was a case in West Palm Beach, Fla., in which a man threatening to “shoot the crowd up” was shot by a concealed carrier; a case in Sunrise, Ariz., in which a man who had already murdered two people at an Independence Day party was killed when his neighbor, a concealed carrier, intervened; a case in Charleston, W.Va., in which a man who started firing into the crowd at a graduation party was killed by a woman with a pistol (“instead of running from the threat,” the police chief said, “she engaged with the threat and saved several lives last night”); a case in South Fulton, Ga., in which a teenager opened fire at multiple people in a park and was taken down by two concealed carriers; a case in Phenix City, Ala., in which two men opened fire at customers at a truck shop but were both struck when one of those customers fired back; and a case in Portland, Ore., in which a man opened fire at a demonstration, killing one and injuring many, before a concealed carrier in the crowd fired back.

How many of these incidents will be counted in the oft-cited statistics? Not enough, I’d venture. Last year, the FBI counted just two interventions from bystanders. Per Lott’s data, that number was actually at least 13. In 2020, the number was at least 10. To conduct even the most-basic extrapolation from these numbers reveals that The New York Times’ claim that “only 22 gunmen” since 2000 have been shot by armed citizens must be badly wrong. Certainly, it is difficult to calculate precisely what would have happened in a halted mass murder event, given that, by definition, such shootings were summarily stopped. But it seems extremely problematic that so many well-documented interventions—and, by extension, so many saved lives—seem to be invisible within the data most-commonly cited by the press.

Over the last decade, the American media has adopted the bad habit of overstating the number of mass shootings in the United States on a scale that is difficult to believe. Writing in The New York Times in 2015, Mark Follman noted that The Washington Post was claiming that there had been 355 mass shootings in 2015 alone, when, in reality, there had been “73 such attacks since 1982.”

The press has managed to burn the candle at both ends: overstating the number of mass murderers, understating the number of interventions and thereby making the concealed carrying of firearms seem a great deal less rational than it is.

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Doesn't fit the narrative of the left, only minority gangbangers should have firearms because they need to defend themselves against us white supremacists.
 
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