Cartoonist Mike Lester "channels John Lott"
Well, at least more people are talking about this. (Thanks to Frank Stephenson for putting this up.)
On the other side, Chuck Carlson has this column. What this piece fails to note is that there are no problems created by those with concealed handgun permits. It is also not necessary that everyone carry a concealed handgun. To me the interesting fact is how incredibly rarely people have to fire their guns to stop these attacks. Even if a small percentage of people carry a gun, you can have a strong deterrent effect. Pennsylvania and Indiana for example have 6.5 percent of the adult population with permits. Even a group of 16 people means that on average, if all permitted people carry a gun, you have about a 100 percent chance that on average an attacker will find that at least one of his potential victims will be able to protect themselves.
On the other side, Chuck Carlson has this column. What this piece fails to note is that there are no problems created by those with concealed handgun permits. It is also not necessary that everyone carry a concealed handgun. To me the interesting fact is how incredibly rarely people have to fire their guns to stop these attacks. Even if a small percentage of people carry a gun, you can have a strong deterrent effect. Pennsylvania and Indiana for example have 6.5 percent of the adult population with permits. Even a group of 16 people means that on average, if all permitted people carry a gun, you have about a 100 percent chance that on average an attacker will find that at least one of his potential victims will be able to protect themselves.
Labels: GunFreeZone
posted by John Lott at 10:24 AM
1 Comments:
Professor Lott,
I've come across some casual commentators who attribute the rise of mass shootings and school shootings to the increased use of anti-depressant and other mood altering medications amongst children and teen-agers. I've thought that this would be an interesting hypothesis to test empirically but when looking into the data it seems difficult to parse out mass school shootings from gang related violence. On net it appears that school shootings overall have declined since the mid eighties which could be explained as the tail of the drug related spike in violent crime. I was wondering if you had any thoughts on these issues? I would guess that you would attribute mass shootings to bad gun policy but could there still be a general increased trend in these types of shootings that deserves a unique explanation?
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