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Mass Killings Stopped by Armed Citizens

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There are several documented cases where armed citizens have stopped mass attacks by gunmen. Let me list a few: The Pearl, Mississippi school shooting was stopped by the vice principal Joel Myrick with a Colt .45, The Appalachian School shooting was stopped by two students with handguns. Both of the above incidents were stopped by the armed citizens threatening the shooter without firing.

Pearl High School Link

Appalacian Law School Link

Plans to slay everyone in the Muskegon, Michigan, store and steal enough cash and jewelry to feed their “gnawing hunger for crack cocaine” fell apart for a band of would-be killers after one of their victims fought back.

Muskegon Shooting Link

The mass church shooting in Colorado Springs was stopped by the shooter being shot by a church member with a CCW permit.

New Life Church Link

The Santa Clara gunshop shooting in 1999 was stopped by an armed citizen after the shooter declared that he was going to kill everyone. Police found a list of intended victims in his car. Only the perpetrator, Richard Gable Stevens was shot.

Santa Clara Gunshop Link

The December, 1991, Aniston, Alabama defense where a CCW holder stopped armed robbers who were herding employees, customers, and his wife into a cooler. He shot both robbers, killing one.

Aniston Shoney’s Shooting Link

July 13, 2009, in Virginia at the Golden Food Market: The gunman tried to shoot several people, was stopped by a CCW carrier.

Golden Food Market Shooting Link

Just recently, in Early Texas, armed citizen Vic Stacy shot and stopped a deranged man who had just murdered two neighbors and was firing at police with a rifle. Stacy made a very long shot with his revolver, three times as far as the perpetrator was from the police officer, who had an AR-15 type rifle.

Early Texas Peach House Shooting Link

That sounds like a very good story… but it never made the national news.

I wonder who made the decision to spike that story.

Of course, when a mass shooting is stopped by an armed citizen, there are not as many victims. This leads to the charge that it would not really have been a “mass shooting”.


Source:


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    Total 25 comments
    • apache5

      They don’t want people to know how a armed and trained citizen would change to world to a safer place, and of course the elite would not be able to control us, which is there goal! come on people wake up and fight back!!!!

      • Equalizer

        Our children are dying for our insanity; It’s time to emulate Israel’s successful efforts to prevent mass killings in schools

        printable page

        Submitted by cbaus on Mon, 12/17/2012 – 07:00.National Politics
        Education
        Guns in the News
        Gun Grabbers

        The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. – Unknown

        by Jim Irvine

        Like you, my heart sank when I heard the news of the mass killings in Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut. “Not again,” I thought. How many people, especially our children must die before we change our thinking? Sadly I fear that 26, including 20 children who were only 6 or 7 years old is not enough.

        Most people have seen a movie that they didn’t like the ending to. Last week was real life that we didn’t like the ending to. But unlike the movies where we must watch what someone else decides, in our own lives, with our own families and our own kids, we have the power to write our own ending. It is too late to save the lives of those lost in Newtown, Connecticut, but not for your children’s school.

        Mass killings are not new and they are not “rare” anymore. After the killings at Century 16 movie theaters in Aurora Colorado this July, I predicted we would see at least one, but probably several more before the end of the year. Only weeks later, 6 people were killed in a Sikh temple Oak Creek, Wisconsin. There have been others. Today I predict that there will be still more of these events next year. I pray I’m wrong.

        In prepared remarks, President Obama said “As a country, we have been through this too many times. Whether it’s an elementary school in Newtown, or a shopping mall in Oregon, or a temple in Wisconsin, or a movie theater in Aurora, or a street corner in Chicago — these neighborhoods are our neighborhoods, and these children are our children. And we’re going to have to come together and take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics.”

        I could not agree with him more strongly.

        On May 15, 1974, three Palestinian terrorists killed 25 people including 22 Israeli children in Ma’alot. They had taken 115 people hostage in Netiv Meir Elementary School. Even though Israel is a smaller, more-close knit country, we are today, where they were then. They had the same resolve to take meaningful action as President Obama, and they carried through with it.

        They decided that it made no sense to have armed people to protect money, but no one to protect their children. They realized the only reliable way to stop an evil person with a gun, was to have a good person with a gun on scene and ready to take action to stop the killing quickly. Such protection does not come cheaply, and like it or not, money is a factor in everything, including our children’s safety.

        Today all Israeli children are protected by at least one armed person. In every school, on every school bus, at school functions and field trips. Parents and teachers are trained and armed. They volunteer to protect their children because they love them. They made a conscious decision that killing them would never again be made so easy. Last week, a total of zero children died in school shootings in Israel. I believe our parents love our children every bit as much as Israeli parents, and we could copy their success.

        We have hundreds of multiple victim killings to study. They are premeditated events. We know that, like the terrible events on Friday, these attacks almost always occur in politically correct, so called “gun free zones.” How sadly ironic. Best of all, we know how to stop the attacks when they start. We must offer resistance and stop the killer. The faster we do this, the fewer people die.

        President Obama has said we are going to “take meaningful action to prevent more tragedies like this, regardless of the politics.” I predict he will do the exact opposite. He will use politics in all its many forms to fight for exactly the type of policies that enable killers to slaughter our children, and the killing will continue. I pray I am wrong.

        How many more children must die before we realize that it is insane to keep disarming the protectors of our children? Like Israel, we need to change our thinking and our preparedness if we expect to see these events end differently. Our children are dying for our insanity.

        Jim Irvine is the Buckeye Firearms Association Chairman, and recipient of the NRA-ILA’s 2011 “Jay M. Littlefield Volunteer of the Year Award” and the CCRKBA’s 2012 “Gun Rights Defender of the Year Award.”

        Additional Information:
        I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother

    • TheJeffness

      I dont think stopping an armed robbery in which the robbers are putting customers into a closet is considered stopping a mass killing. Some of the other ones for sure, some ones maybe…but definitely not the Aniston, Al one.

      • lee65

        We may never know, I have worked in Grocery Stores and other retail and food outlets. Nine times out of ten the robbers do not kill in the front window, they take everyone to a closet, freezer, or just the back room and kill them there. I have always carried a gun and worked nights while I was in the Army for 27 years. They always tell employees not to resist when robbed, do what you are told and I agreed to the point they want me to go to the back room, all of my employees knew that I would never walk away from front windows of the store and they accepted that or I looked elsewhere.

      • Goldbug36

        Excuse me, but they weren’t herding people into a closet .. but into a cooler .. you know, a walk-in refrigerator? This was obviously a copy-cat moron trying to duplicate a scene that has been shown in movies. I guarantee you, if you are ever confronted with a gun in your face, you will pray to God that a CCW permit holder is nearby. :roll:

    • Chris Jacob

      Yeah right…You are living in your grand pa’s world, if you think guns could save you…may be 100 years back not anymore…

      Americans had all their guns, when NDAA was passed, when chem trails fly over and come down on you and your kids every day, you eat GMO food without even freaking labeling, you drink fluoride everyday…Your kids gets RFID and get mercury vaccination all the while you had your guns, you see jobs being shipped to China, when you had your gun and so on….in short, you are losing your freedom every day since you had that gun, what did you do about that…Do you still think you are alive and worth enough for some government agent, MP to bang your door to get your gun.

      Wake up….This is asymmetric warfare…..The platform of warfare has changed, you ain’t living in a world where your guns could save you….With GMO, Mercury, Flouride, Chemtrail in your body…Most would consider your already dead…you are just a zombie for the elite….Good to be alive, so that you can infect others with your zombie thoughts that guns are the answer…

      • jbw

        And YOU are a clueless, brain-stemming idiot of the highest (lowest) order…

    • bicycledays

      Great article. Thank you for postings. Guns do save lives. Visit http://gunssavelives.net/

    • Pateriot

      Had someone had a gun there could have been a very different outcome to this school shooting. Perhaps he could have been scared off, preferably shot and killed!

    • Smith

      Thanks for the article. A good reiteration that people kill people.. not guns. I’m amazed at these anti gun protestors. Ironically it’s a trained armed citizen that might save their life someday. Guns and criminals and the mentally ill will always exist. Do you want protection? A lot of people say no :lol: But those kinds of people are most likely to afraid to pick up a gun let alone squeeze the trigger, or even aim properly. So perhaps it’s a bad idea for them to carry a firearm.

    • Anonymous

      Fox News is right to debate this Now like they did before !!!!!
      With these latest mass shootings across the USA it would be good to know if these Murders grew up playing Video games ?
      This story from 2 years ago is worth debating .

      http://games.slashdot.org/story/11/02/10/0534237/Fox-News-Brings-Video-Game-Violence-Debate-To-a-New-Low?from=twitter
      Our Young Minds are growing up with this as their Baby Sitter , Nanny and Security Blanket when these Young Minds Lose their sense of Direction and the time has come to Talk about is it worth the Business of selling Violence , and I mean even in Hollywood !!!!

    • Equalizer

      @ apache5
      Bulls-eye!!!

    • Tom Degan

      Beautiful idea. Let’s just arm the students! But seriously, folks….Another view:

      http://www.tomdegan.blogspot.com/2012/12/massacre-in-newtown.html

      Cheers!

      Tom Degan

    • GranPaSmurf

      More than a few rural Texas school districts require teachers and/or administrators to have Concealed Carry permits and carry their weapons. There is no published list of them (well, duh!) My niece and her husband teach in one.
      In a trip to Israel we were impressed to see every field trip of school students accompanied by two openly armed guards.

    • vet4freedom

      im a dsabled veteran . and a gun owner with a permit to carry . if i wasnt carryng that night i dont think i would be here .

      • Equalizer

        @vet4freedom
        I too have concealed weapons permit and am trained to protect and serve. Things would have been diffrent if I or someone with similar training was at any of the the recent school shooting locations dressed in plainclothes with basic walkie communications to classroom teachers. If the Federal government was more concerned about truly “protecting school children” they would set up a secured entrance into schools where an individual with a concealed weapons license and bonded to protect the students and teachers could easily monitor anyone coming into the school with a weapon. Teachers would have a panic button and radio to communicate directly with a plainclothes individual. In most cases the dangerous perpetrators would never make it into the school to begin with or would be stopped before they knew what hit them. but since our “current administration” is more concerned about disarming law abiding citizens and scaring the public with a barrage of ongoing liberal news media programs to create fear and paranoia then implementing an inexpensive program like this because it would empower the public and not the Federal government/United Nations NAZI agenda.

    • fatdaddy

      very cool.

    • lee65

      Gun owners dong good does not make news, only blood. Remember the old saying in the newspaper business: “if it bleeds it leads”. Now it is if it helps get rid of guns it leads if not bury it. The media is our second worst enemy, we have been betrayed by them and will not ever be trusting them again

    • d_romprey

      The extensive media coverage of these horrific events I feel is a big part of the problem. So many people feel so inconsequential in this world and see the opportunity to claim some fame by doing these evil deeds. They feel they have nothing to live for and look at this as a way to leave their mark. It is sad but true….. I think these events should not be sensationalized by the media. Maybe they should only be covered locally for the people it directly effects. Cover the good happenings widely and maybe we will see more of those.

    • medicalsleuth

      I think that every school in America should have this sign on all entrances:
      ATTENTION: THIS SCHOOL IS PROTECTED BY ARMED ADULTS, ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK!!!

      There should be volunteers at the school who go through a concealed carry class and actually have weapons at the school. This may have saved some lives at Newton. The gunman may have committed suicide earlier if confronted by an armed adult…

    • Equalizer

      If the federal government truly cared about innocent children, they would spend some of our tax money to protect them and not attack innocent citizens. it is all about “control” not protecting children. Any idiot knows that the statistics regarding gun control hurts women, children and families.
      The Down-Side of Gun Control = Genocide

      Advocates cannot see any harm in gun control, but it has a nasty
      downside. Its victims number in the tens of millions. Its downside is
      genocide: the mass-murder of civilians on account of religion,
      language, or political views. Since 1900, at least seven major
      genocides have occurred worldwide involving 50-60 million victims (see
      table).

      MAJOR 20th CENTURY GENOCIDES — THE COST OF GUN-CONTROL
      Date of
      Perpetrator # Murdered Gun-Ctrl Source
      Gov. Date Target (Estimated) Law Document
      ~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~~
      Ottoman 1915-17 Armenians 1-1.5 Mil. 1866 Art. 166,
      Turky Penal Code

      Soviet 1929-53 Anti-Comm. 20 Million 1929 Art. 128,
      Union Anti-Stal. Penal Code

      Nazi 1933-45 Jews, 13 Million 1928 Law on Fire-
      Germany Anti-Nazis, arms & Ammun.
      & occupied Gypsies April 12,
      Europe Weapons Law,
      March 18

      China 1948-52 Anti- 20 Million 1935 Arts. 186 & 7
      Communists Penal Code.
      1966- Pro-Reform
      1976 Group

      Guatemala 1960-81 Mayan 100,000 1871 Decree #36
      Indians 1964 Decree #283

      Uganda 1971-79 Christians, 300,000 1955 Firearms Ord.
      Pol. Rivals 1970 Firearms Act

      Cambodia 1975-79 Educated 1 Million 1956 Arts. 322-328,
      Persons Penal Code

      TOTAL VICTIMS: 55.9 MILLION

    • concerned

      University Study Confirms
      Private Firearms
      Stop Crime 2.5 Million Times Each Year
      By J. Neil Schulman
      4-20-7

      Gary Kleck, Ph.D. is a professor in the School of Criminology and Criminal Justice at Florida State University in Tallahassee and author of “Point Blank: Guns and Violence in America” (Aldine de Gruyter, 1991), a book widely cited in the national gun-control debate. In an exclusive interview, Dr. Kleck revealed some preliminary results of the National Self- Defense Survey which he and his colleague Dr. Marc Gertz conducted in Spring, 1993. Though he stresses that the results of the survey are preliminary and subject to future revision, Kleck is satisfied that the survey’s results confirm his analysis of previous surveys which show that American civilians commonly use their privately-owned firearms to defend themselves against criminal attacks, and that such defensive uses significantly outnumber the criminal uses of firearms in America. The new survey, conducted by random telephone sampling of 4,978 households in all the states except Alaska and Hawaii, yield results indicating that American civilians use their firearms as often as 2.5 million times every year defending against a confrontation with a criminal, and that handguns alone account for up to 1.9 million defenses per year. Previous surveys, in Kleck’s analysis, had underrepresented the extent of private firearms defenses because the questions asked failed to account for the possibility that a particular respondent might have had to use his or her firearm more than once.

      Dr. Kleck will first present his survey results at an upcoming meeting of the American Society of Criminology, but he agreed to discuss his preliminary analysis, even though it is uncustomary to do so in advance of complete peer review, because of the great extent which his earlier work is being quoted in public debates on firearms public policy.

      The interview was conducted September 14-17, 1993 by J. Neil Schulman, a novelist, screenwriter, and journalist who has written extensively on firearms public policy for several years.

      Readers may be interested to know that Kleck is a member of the ACLU, Amnesty International USA, and Common Cause, among other politically liberal organizations. He is also a lifelong registered Democrat. He is not and has never been a member of or contributor to the NRA, Handgun Control Inc., or any other advocacy group on either side of the gun-control issue, nor has he received funding for research from any such organization.

      ——————————————————————————–

      SCHULMAN: Dr. Kleck, can you tell me generally what was discovered in your recent survey that wasn’t previously known?

      KLECK: Well, the survey mostly generated results pretty consistent with those of a dozen previous surveys which generally indicates that defensive use of guns is pretty common and probably more common than criminal uses of guns. This survey went beyond previous ones in that it provided detail about how often people who had used a gun had done so. We asked people was the gun used defensively in the past five years and if so how many times did that happen and we asked details about what exactly happened. We nailed down that each use being reported was a bona fide defensive use against a human being in connection with a crime where there was an actual confrontation between victim and offender. Previous surveys were a little hazy on the details of exactly what was being reported as a defensive gun use. It wasn’t, for example, clear that the respondents weren’t reporting investigating a suspicious noise in their back yard with a gun where there was, in fact, nobody there. Our results ended up indicating, depending on which figures you prefer to use, anywhere from 800,000 on up to 2.4, 2.5 million defensive uses of guns against human beings — not against animals — by civilians each year.

      SCHULMAN: Okay. Let’s see if we can pin down some of these figures. I understand you asked questions having to do with just the previous one year. Is that correct?

      KLECK: That’s correct. We asked both for recollections about the preceding five years and for just what happened in the previous one year, the idea being that people would be able to remember more completely what had happened just in the past year.

      SCHULMAN: And your figures reflect this?

      KLECK: Yes. The estimates are considerably higher if they’re based on people’s presumably more-complete recollection of just what happened in the previous year.

      SCHULMAN: Okay. So you’ve given us the definition of what a “defense” is. It has to be an actual confrontation against a human being attempting a crime? Is that correct?

      KLECK: Correct.

      SCHULMAN: And it excludes all police, security guards, and military personnel?

      KLECK: That’s correct.

      SCHULMAN: Okay. Let’s ask the “one year” question since you say that’s based on better recollections. In the last year how many people who responded to the questionnaire said that they had used a firearm to defend themselves against an actual confrontation from a human being attempting a crime?

      KLECK: Well, as a percentage it’s 1.33 percent of the respondents. When you extrapolate that to the general population, it works out to be 2.4 million defensive uses of guns of some kind — not just handguns but any kind of a gun — within that previous year, which would have been roughly from Spring of 1992 through Spring of 1993.

      SCHULMAN: And if you focus solely on handguns?

      KLECK: It’s about 1.9 million, based on personal, individual recollections.

      SCHULMAN: And what percentage of the respondents is that? Just handguns?

      KLECK: That would be 1.03 percent.

      SCHULMAN: How many respondents did you have total?

      KLECK: We had a total of 4,978 completed interviews, that is, where we had a response on the key question of whether or not there had been a defensive gun use.

      SCHULMAN: So roughly 50 people out of 5000 responded that in the last year they had had to use their firearms in an actual confrontation against a human being attempting a crime?

      KLECK: Handguns, yes.

      SCHULMAN: Had used a handgun. And slightly more than that had used any gun.

      KLECK: Right.

      SCHULMAN: So that would be maybe 55, 56 people?

      KLECK: Something like that, yeah.

      SCHULMAN: Okay. I can just hear critics saying that 50 or 55 people responding that they used their gun and you’re projecting it out to figures of around 2 million, 2-1/2 million gun defenses. Why is that statistically valid?

      KLECK: Well, that’s one reason why we also had a five-year recollection period. We get a much larger raw number of people saying, “Yes, I had a defensive use.” It doesn’t work out to be as many per year because people are presumably not remembering as completely, but the raw numbers of people who remember some kind of defensive use over the previous five years, that worked out to be on the order of 200 sample cases. So it’s really a small raw number only if you limit your attention to those who are reporting an incident just in the previous year. Statistically, it’s strictly the raw numbers that are relevant to the issue.

      SCHULMAN: So if between 1 percent to 1-1/3 percent of your respondents are saying that they defended themselves with a gun, how does this compare, for example, to the number of people who would respond that they had suffered from a crime during that period?

      KLECK: I really couldn’t say. We didn’t ask that and I don’t think there are really any comparable figures. You could look at the National Crime Surveys for relatively recent years and I guess you could take the share of the population that had been the victims of some kind of violent crime because most of these apparently are responses to violent crimes. Ummm, let’s see. The latest year for which I have any data, 1991, would be about 9 percent of the population had suffered a personal crime — that’s a crime with personal contact. And so, to say that 1 percent of the population had defended themselves with a handgun is obviously still well within what you would expect based on the share of the population that had suffered a personal crime of some kind. Plus a number of these defensive uses were against burglars, which isn’t considered a personal crime according to the National Crime Survey. But you can add in maybe another 5 percent who’d been a victim of a household burglary.

      SCHULMAN: Let’s break down some of these gun defenses if we can. How many are against armed robbers? How many are against burglars? How many are against people committing a rape or an assault?

      KLECK: About 8 percent of the defensive uses involved a sexual crime such as an attempted sexual assault. About 29 percent involved some sort of assault other than sexual assault. Thirty-three percent involved a burglary or some other theft at home. Twenty-two percent involved robbery. Sixteen percent involved trespassing. Note that some incidents could involve more than one crime.

      SCHULMAN: Do you have a breakdown of how many occurred on somebody’s property and how many occurred, let’s say, off somebody’s property where somebody would have had to have been carrying a gun with them on their person or in their car?

      KLECK: Yes. We asked where the incident took place. Seventy-two percent took place in or near the home, where the gun wouldn’t have to be “carried” in a legal sense. And then some of the remainder, maybe another 4 percent, occurred in a friend’s home where that might not necessarily involve carrying. Also, some of these incidents may have occurred in a vehicle in a parking lot and that’s another 4 percent or so. So some of those incidents may have involved a less-regulated kind of carrying. In many states, for example, it doesn’t require a license to carry a gun in your vehicle so I’d say that the share that involved carrying in a legal sense is probably less than a quarter of the incidents. I won’t commit myself to anything more than that because we don’t have the specifics of whether or not some of these away-from-home incidents occurred while a person was in a car.

      SCHULMAN: All right. Well, does that mean that approximately a half million times a year somebody carrying a gun away from home uses it to defend himself or herself?

      KLECK: That’s what it would imply, yes.

      SCHULMAN: All right. As many as one-half million times every year somebody carrying a gun away from home defends himself or herself.

      KLECK: Yes, about that. It could be as high as that. I have many different estimates and some of the estimates are deliberately more conservative in that they exclude from our sample any cases where it was not absolutely clear that there was a genuine defensive gun use being reported.

      SCHULMAN: Were any of these gun uses done by anyone under the age of 21 or under the age of 18?

      KLECK: Well we don’t have any coverage of persons under the age of 18. Like most national surveys we cover only adults age 18 and up.

      SCHULMAN: Did you have any between the ages of 18 and 21?

      KLECK: I haven’t analyzed the cross tabulation of age with defensive gun use so I couldn’t say at this point.

      SCHULMAN: Okay. Was this survey representative just of Florida or is it representative of the entire United States?

      KLECK: It’s representative of the lower 48 states.

      SCHULMAN: And that means that there was calling throughout all the different states?

      KLECK: Yes, except Alaska and Hawaii, and that’s also standard practice for national surveys; because of the expense they usually aren’t contacted.

      SCHULMAN: How do these surveys make their choices, for example, between high-crime urban areas and less-crime rural areas?

      KLECK: Well, there isn’t a choice made in that sense. It’s a telephone survey and the telephone numbers are randomly chosen by computer so that it works out that every residential telephone number in the lower 48 states had an equal chance of being picked, except that we deliberately oversampled from the South and the West and then adjusted after the fact for that overrepresentation. It results in no biasing. The results are representative of the entire United States, but it yields a larger number of sample cases of defensive gun uses. They are, however, weighted back down so that they properly represent the correct percent of the population that’s had a defensive gun use.

      SCHULMAN: Why is it that the results of your survey are so counter-intuitive compared to police experience?

      KLECK: For starters, there are substantial reasons for people not to report defensive gun uses to the police or, for that matter, even to interviewers working for researchers like me — the reason simply being that a lot of the times people either don’t know whether their defensive act was legal or even if they think that was legal, they’re not sure that possessing a gun at that particular place and time was legal. They may have a gun that’s supposed to be registered and it’s not or maybe it’s totally legally owned but they’re not supposed to be walking around on the streets with it.

      SCHULMAN: Did your survey ask the question of whether people carrying guns had licenses to do so?

      KLECK: No, we did not. We thought that would be way too sensitive a question to ask people.

      SCHULMAN: Okay. Let’s talk about how the guns were actually used in order to accomplish the defense. How many people, for example, had to merely show the gun, as opposed to how many had to fire a warning shot, as to how many actually had to attempt to shoot or shoot their attacker?

      KLECK: We got all of the details about everything that people could have done with a gun from as mild an action as merely verbally referring to the gun on up to actually shooting somebody.

      SCHULMAN: Could you give me the percentages?

      KLECK: Yes. You have to keep in mind that it’s quite possible for people to have done more than one of these things since they could obviously both verbally refer to the gun and point it at somebody or even shoot it.

      SCHULMAN: Okay.

      KLECK: Fifty-four percent of the defensive gun uses involved somebody verbally referring to the gun. Forty-seven percent involved the gun being pointed at the criminal. Twenty-two percent involved the gun being fired. Fourteen percent involved the gun being fired at somebody, meaning it wasn’t just a warning shot; the defender was trying to shoot the criminal. Whether they succeeded or not is another matter but they were trying to shoot a criminal. And then in 8 percent they actually did wound or kill the offender.

      SCHULMAN: In 8 percent, wounded or killed. You don’t have it broken down beyond that?

      KLECK: Wound versus kill? No. Again that was thought to be too sensitive a question. Although we did have, I think, two people who freely offered the information that they had, indeed, killed someone. Keep in mind that the 8 percent figure is based on so few cases that you have to interpret it with great caution.

      SCHULMAN: Did anybody respond to a question asking whether they had used the gun and it was found afterward to be unjustified?

      KLECK: We did not ask them that question although we did ask them what crime they thought was being committed. So in each case the only incidents we were accepting as bona fide defensive gun uses were ones where the defender believed that, indeed, a crime had been committed against them.

      SCHULMAN: Did you ask any follow-up questions about how many people had been arrested or captured as a result of their actions?

      KLECK: No.

      SCHULMAN: Did you ask any questions about aid in law enforcement, such as somebody helps a police officer who’s not themselves an officer?

      KLECK: No. I imagine that would be far too rare an incident to get any meaningful information out of it. Highly unlikely that any significant share of these involved assisting law enforcement.

      SCHULMAN: The question which this all comes down to is that we already have some idea, for example from surveys on CCW license holders, how rare it is for a CCW holder to misuse their gun in a way to injure somebody improperly. But does this give us any idea of what the percentages are of people who carry a gun having to use it in order to defend himself or herself? In other words, comparing the percentage of defending yourself to the percentage of being attacked, does this tell us anything?

      KLECK: We asked them whether they carried guns at any time but we didn’t directly ask them if they were carrying guns, in the legal sense, at the time they had used their gun defensively. So we can probably say what fraction of gun carriers in our sample had used a gun defensively but we can’t say whether they did it while carrying. They may, for example, have been people who at least occasionally carried a gun for protection but they used a gun defensively in their own home.

      SCHULMAN: So what percentage of gun carriers used it defensively?

      KLECK: I haven’t calculated it yet so I couldn’t say.

      SCHULMAN: So if we assume, let’s say, that every year approximately 9 percent of people are going to be attacked, and approximately every year that 1 percent of respondents used their guns to defend against an attack, is it fair to say that around one out of nine people attacked used their guns to defend themselves?

      KLECK: That “risk of being attacked” shouldn’t be phrased that way. It’s the risk of being the victim of a personal crime. In other words, it involved interpersonal contact. That could be something like a nonviolent crime like purse snatching or pickpocketing as well. The fact that personal contact is involved means there’s an opportunity to defend against it using a gun; it doesn’t necessarily mean there was an attack on the victim.

      SCHULMAN: Did you get any data on how the attackers were armed during these incidents?

      KLECK: Yes. We also asked whether the offender was armed. The offender was armed in 47.2 percent of the cases and they had a handgun in about 13.6 percent of all the cases and some other kind of gun in 4.5 percent of all the cases.

      SCHULMAN: So in other words, in about a sixth of the cases, the person attacking was armed with a firearm.

      KLECK: That’s correct.

      SCHULMAN: Okay. And the remainder?

      KLECK: Armed with a knife: 18.1 percent, 2 percent with some other sharp object, 10.1 percent with a blunt object, and 6 percent with some other weapon. Keep in mind when adding this up that offenders could have had more than one weapon.

      SCHULMAN: So in approximately five sixths of the cases somebody carrying a gun for defensive reasons would find themselves defending themselves either against an unarmed attacker or an attacker with a lesser weapon?

      KLECK: Right. About five-sixths of the time.

      SCHULMAN: And about one-sixth of the time they would find themselves up against somebody who’s armed with a firearm.

      KLECK: Well, certainly in this sample of incidents that was the case.

      SCHULMAN: Which you believe is representative.

      KLECK: It’s representative of what’s happened in the last five years. Whether or not it would be true in the future we couldn’t say for sure.

      SCHULMAN: Are there any other results coming out of this which are surprising to you?

      KLECK: About the only thing which was surprising is how often people had actually wounded someone in the incident. Previous surveys didn’t have very many sample cases so you couldn’t get into the details much but some evidence had suggested that a relatively small share of incidents involved the gun inflicting wounds so it was surprising to me that quite so many defenders had used a gun that way.

      SCHULMAN: Dr. Kleck, is there anything else you’d like to say at this time about the results of your survey and your continuing analysis of them?

      KLECK: Nope.

      SCHULMAN: Then thank you very much.

      KLECK: You’re welcome.

    • murdocc

      Uh? Did you guys actually read the links?

      Pearl High School: the gunman killed 2 people and shot 7 more. He was confronted by the armed principle after he had finished his shooting and returned to his car. Explain to me exactly how the killing was stopped?

      Appalacian law school: the killer killed 3 and wounded 3 more. Once again, he was confronted after he left the building, having already killed his targets.

      New life church: The link says 2 innocent people were left dead while your synopsis says only the shooter was shot. More over the person who stopped him was a former police officer, presumebly with years of training and experience

      Samta clara: “SANTA CLARA, Calif. (Reuters) – A shootout at a California shooting range ended a bizarre hostage drama during which three gun store employees found themselves staring down the barrel of one of their own rented rifles, police said Tuesday.” Their own gun used against them. This is a seperate issue but worth mentioning. I’ll give you this one though because he was in fact shot before he could hurt anyone.

      Anistom shoney: armed robbery. One of the patrons killed one of the armed robbers. Good on him, but not exactly preventing a mass shooting. They likely would have left once they had finished robbing the place. More over, he’s lucky the other shooters didnt return fire. Someone else might have been hurt. Im not trying to argue that what he did was wrong. Im just sayin that 2 people exchanging fire in an occupied space is bad news.

      A few of those links did actually support what the title suggested. In all but one of those stories was the shooted stopped before he had already killed with his gun. Thats not exactly convincing me that more guns would make things better.

      Full disclosure here: im for a federal assault weapons ban. Im not for a total ban though. People have the right to own guns. I just think large clips and assault weapons have no place outside a battlefield. I wrote all this because a facebook friend posted this horribly inacurate post and I just had to butt in.

      • SoCo13

        Assault weapons were banned in 1999 – so your wish was granted 13 years ago. The Bushmaster AR-15 used is NOT an assault weapon by legal definition.

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