Good guys with Guns vs Bad guys with Guns

The media was in full spin mode after a young man legally carrying a gun stopped the mass public shooting at the Indianapolis mall. The Associated Press and the New York Times relied on data from Texas State University to claim that active shooting cases are rarely stopped by people legally carrying concealed handguns. Earlier research I did while I was at the US DOJ pointed out what a mess their data was and all the cases they missed. I wrote an op-ed for Newsweek that explained how people legally carrying guns often stop these attacks, but what was unique about the Indianapolis case was that it got national news attention. I also appeared on the Sean Hannity Radio Show (16 million weekly listeners), the dozens of Sinclair Broadcasting television stations, One America News, and America's Voice Live to make that point. I think that the interview with Hannity went well.

The FBI data from 2014 to 2021 claims that 18 times someone legally carrying a gun stopped a mass public shooting. By contrast, our list contains 46 cases.

A piece that I had at Real Clear Politics discussed how the Associated Press finally recognizes that AR-15s are not weapons of war, but while that is a welcome change, the time of their change is very suspicious. A number of the radio interviews I did over the last two weeks have focused on the media bias on guns (e.g., this interview on Minneapolis' KTLK, Vicki McKenna in Wisconsin, Officer Tatum national radio show, and St. Louis's KLJY). I got particularly passionate about media bias when talking with Vicki.

Another worthwhile appearance was Jim Bohannon's national radio show with almost 6 million listeners, where we talked about the recent Supreme Court case on New York's concealed carry law. And I talked to TRT World about the video of police standing outside the Uvalde school classroom.

A new Trafalgar Group survey of 1,078 likely general election voters from July 7th to 10th, 2022, shows they believe that armed citizens are much more effective in protecting people in a mass shooting than local police or federal agents. On that front, Mississippi moved to let local schools decide if teachers can carry guns at school.

If you want to know about the battle we are up against, the federal government's National Institute of Health and Centers for Disease Control gave out $75 million for firearms research to public health researchers since 2019. If you want to know about the problems with public health research, you can read my book The War on Guns, see this comparative survey that we did a couple of years ago on different types of researchers, or see some of the posts that we have put up on public health research.

We have continued updating our list of someone legally carrying a gun stopping what likely would have been mass public shootings.

For most of the next two weeks, I will be giving talks on gun control in Brazil, Paraguay, and Peru. They don't have any academics to push back on all the anti-gun claims.

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