Yet more evidence that these killers are deterred by people with guns: Charleston, South Carolina Church Shooter

As I have previously pointed out how mass public shooting after mass public shooting keep occurring where guns are banned. Here is yet another case of these killers avoiding places where people with guns might be able to stop their killing spree. From the Associated Press:

Last week, while they were drinking in the back of Scriven's house, Roof blurted out his plan about carrying out a mass shooting at the College of Charleston.
"I don't think the church was his primary target because he told us he was going for the school," Scriven said Friday. "But I think he couldn't get into the school because of the security ... so I think he just settled for the church." . . .

Here is what the College of Charleston puts up regarding their armed officers.

Police officers responding to an active shooter are trained to proceed immediately to the area in which shots were last heard in order to stop the shooting as quickly as possible. The first responding officers may be in teams; they may be dressed in normal patrol uniforms, or they may be wearing external ballistic vests and Kevlar helmets or other tactical gear. The officers may be armed with rifles, shotguns or handguns. Do exactly as the officers instruct. The first responding officers will be focused on stopping the active shooter and creating a safe environment for medical assistance to be brought in to aid the injured. . . .

I have spoken recently about mass public shootings at the law school at the College of Charleston, and given that it was my topic, I checked out the security measures at the school.  There were no metal detectors present, just a reliance on armed campus security.

The media generally ignores that these attacks keep occurring where guns are banned, instead concentrating on how the killer obtained the gun or the weapon used. Yet, it is very hard to stop people who are planning these attacks over 6 months in advance from getting a weapon. Background checks and other "solutions" wouldn't stop these attacks that are being used to motivate the laws.

"His mom had taken the gun from him and somehow he went back and took it from her."

(We have previously noted that Greta's show on Fox News interviewed one of the killer's friends who had said that the killer had stolen the gun he used from his mom without her knowing it.)

Uber and Lyft prohibiting firearms for drivers, riders

After an Uber driver in Chicago used his gun to stop a mass public shooting and save lives, the company is moving to ban guns in its cars?  Uber has posted the above policy note on its website.

We have adopted a no-firearms policy to ensure that both riders and drivers feel safe and comfortable on the platform. We made this policy change after assessing existing policies and carefully reviewing recent feedback from both riders and driver-partners.

Uber has learned nothing from all these attacks that keep occurring where guns are banned.

With 11.1 million concealed carry permit holders last year, that is a lot of potential customers that Uber and Lyft are turning down.

Something that you probably won't hear about regarding George Zimmerman

Remember all the news coverage about George Zimmerman's supposed road rage behavior earlier this year?  Well, here is something that you aren't going to hear about very much (from Fox News):

A prosecutor on Thursday upgraded to attempted murder the most serious charge against a man accused of shooting into George Zimmerman's vehicle while they were driving down a busy road last month. 

State Attorney Phil Archer charged 36-year-old Matthew Apperson with attempted second-degree murder. Apperson had been charged earlier with aggravated assault and battery for firing a gun into Zimmerman's car during a traffic run-in last month on a busy road in an Orlando suburb. Zimmerman had minor injuries. 

Apperson also faces an aggravated assault charge and a charge of shooting into an occupied vehicle. 

"Our law enforcement community and the State Attorney's Office works vigorously to ensure people may travel our busy streets, going about their business, without fear," Archer said in a statement announcing the new charge. "Every resident and visitor to Seminole County deserves this freedom." . . .

Newest piece at Fox News: "Gun-free zones an easy target for killers"

John Lott has a new op-ed at Fox News on the 

The horrible tragedy last night that left nine people dead at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., probably could have been avoided. Like so many other attacks, the massacre took place in a gun-free zone, a place where the general public was banned from having guns. The gun-free zone obviously didn’t stop the killer from bringing a gun into the church. 

Indeed, the circumstantial evidence is strong that these killers don’t attack randomly; they keep picking the few gun-free zones to do virtually all their attacks. 

For some reason, people who would never put up a “gun-free zone” sign in front of their own homes, put up such signs for other sensitive areas that we would like to protect. 

Time after time, we see that these killers tell us they pick soft targets. With just two exceptions, from at least 1950, all the mass public shootings have occurred in these gun-free zones. From last summer’s mass public killers in Santa Barbara and Canada, to the Aurora movie theater shooter, these killers made it abundantly clear in their diaries or on Facebook how they avoided targets where people with guns could stop them. 

And even when concealed handgun permit holders don’t deter the killers, the permit holders stop them. Just a couple of weeks ago, a mass public shooting at a liquor store in Conyers, Ga., was stopped by a concealed handgun permit holder. A couple of people had already been killed by the time the permit holder arrived, but according to Rockdale County Sheriff Eric Levett: 

"I believe that if Mr. Scott did not return fire at the suspect, then more of those customers would have [been] hit by a gun. It didn’t appear that he cared who he shot or where he was shooting until someone was shooting back at him. So, in my opinion, he saved other lives in that store." 

Yet, even though there was a video of this heroic action, the story got no national news coverage. Case after case occurs where concealed handgun permit holders stop what would have been mass shootings. While many don’t get news coverage because the permit holder prevents people from being killed, some, such as the recent Georgia case, still don’t get coverage even when there are dead bodies. 

These heroes just don’t stop attacks in small towns in Georgia. . . . .

John Stossel on CNN's airing of ‘Deceitful’ Blackfish Documentary

CNN uncritically kept on running the film as news:

But in January 2013, when director Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s documentary Blackfish about these alleged abuses debuted at Sundance, the niche murmurs began to get louder. And after the doc first aired on CNN in October, the protests hit the mainstream. . . . 

John Stossel shows the false claims made in the movie.

Jake Tapper: When Bill Clinton complained about guns in Baltimore, ask him why the law-abiding poor can't carry

Bill Clinton on CNN's State of the Union:

. . . The Baltimore thing came on the heels of what happened in Ferguson, what happened in New York City and all these other places. And their is a big national movement about whether the lives of young African-American men count. 

You can’t have people walking around with guns. I used to tell people when we did Bosnia, Kosovo anything like that, you get enough people with weapons around and there will be unintended consequences. People make mistakes People do wrong. Things happen. To hold a community together you got to have a high level of community trust. . . .

Note that in Baltimore, it costs over $300 to license and register a handgun to own in the home.  It is virtually impossible to get a concealed handgun permit (just 0.3% of adults in Maryland have a permit), and about half of those are retired police officers.  The permits that are issued are definitely not going to people who live in this poor area of Baltimore.  The formal legal costs of getting a permit are not just the license and registration fees to own a handgun, but also the $75 ($70 application and $5 fingerprinting fee) and training costs.  Even then they are just a small part of the cost of getting a concealed handgun permit.  The poor aren't going to hiring lawyers to go through the legal process to get approval to have a permit, and even if they did, it is unlikely that a judge would grant them a permit.

Latest Fox News piece: "Connecticut's strict gun licensing law linked to steep drop in homicides? Not really"

My newest piece at Fox News starts this way:

A new study in the American Journal of Public Health claims that the state of Connecticut’s 1995 gun licensing law has reduced firearm homicide rates by 40 percent.  But this just released study gives academics a bad name.  Not surprisingly, anti-gun activist and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg and the left-wing Joyce Foundation funded the research. 

The study cherry picks which states with gun licensing laws are examined, which years are looked at, and the type of crime to study. Any normal researcher would look at all the states in the country that have passed a similar law and compares the changes in crime trends between those states that passed the laws to those that didn’t. 

Sure, from 1995 to 2005 the firearm homicide rate in Connecticut did indeed fall from 3.13 to 1.88 per 100,000 people, a 40% drop over a ten-year period.  Not mentioned is that the firearms homicide rate was falling even faster immediately before the licensing law went into effect, falling from 4.5 to 3.13 per 100,000 residents -- more than a 30 percent drop in just two years. 

When researchers throw out data, there had better be a good reason.  They didn’t have one. They cite a paper that looked at the impact of smoking for 12 years after cigarette taxes were increased. What cigarettes have to do with explaining crime rates and what 12 years has to do with only looking at 10 years of data is never explained, though possibly they thought no one would actually read the paper they cited. 

In any case, their results change appreciably if just one more year is added to their data.  Between 1995 and 2006, Connecticut’s firearm homicide rate fell by just 16 percent.  By comparison, the rates for the U.S. and the rest of the Northeast fell respectively by 27 percent and 22 percent.  If Connecticut’s firearm homicide rate didn’t fall as much as the rest of the country, why should we think that the licensing law was so beneficial? 

Why the authors of the study chose to ignore other violent crimes also becomes clear pretty quickly. Relative to the rest of the United States, Connecticut’s overall violent crime rate as well as its robbery and aggravated assault rates were clearly falling prior to the prior to the 1995 law and rising afterwards.  Rape was unchanged. . . .

The rest of the piece is available here.

Media Matters misdirects on FBI report on mass shootings

Media Matters has put out its typical misinformation.  This time on Jason Riley's piece on the now acknowledged errors in the FBI report on public shootings.  As I wrote last October in a post at the Crime Prevention Research Center:

While the FBI report provides graphs illustrating “active shooting incidents,” not mass shootings, given the way that the report was written, the media has understandably interpreted the report as implying that mass public shootings have massively increased over time. . . .

The bottom line here is that neither Media Matters nor some of the authors from a FBI report on public shootings were able to defend the data used in the FBI report so they focus on a red herring, whether the media got confused about the report being on mass public shootings.  Media Matters doesn't even try to defend the 20 missing mass shooting cases that should clearly have been included in the Blair and Martaindale data set.  Nor does Media Matters try to defend the way that the FBI report measured active shooter cases.

Jason Riley explicitly mentions that Blair and Martaindale complain that the media misunderstood their point on the issue of Mass shootings/active shooters (Riley writes: "[Blair and Martaindale] said that the news media “got it wrong” last year when they 'mistakenly reported mass shootings were on the rise'”, Riley provides a directly link to their piece in the ACJS, and John Lott's report explicitly spends a great deal of time discussing the problems with their measure of "active shooters."  Whether one wants to lump together mass public shootings with cases where a shot is fired in public and no one is hit, Lott's point was that Blair and Martaindale's measure of these active shooter cases is biased towards picking up just recent cases and thus tends to make it look as if there were an increase in public shootings over time.  

1964 Johnny Seven OMA Toy Gun Commercial: I remember this ad from when I was a kid

Here is something that you won't see advertised these days.