On Friday, 27 February, 2015, John Lott gave testimony at the Wyoming legislature, which is considering eliminating many gun free zones. Dr. Lott's testimony was so impressive, that Wyoming Public Television invited him on Capitol Outlook Week. The video has been posted on YouTube. Everyone who is interested in public mass shootings and concealed carry should see this video. Dr. Lott spend considerable time explaining how people who are carrying concealed complicate the plans of mass shooters.
John Lott is the academic who wrote "More Guns Less Crime" based on his research about the effects of shall issue concealed carry legislation. He published the third edition of his work, with nine more years of data added to the analysis from the second edition, in 2010.
John Lott covers the intense planning done by these shooters, and how many documented that they were clearly considering whether or not their target was a gun free zone. He states that six months is a short time for the people who plan out these attacks.
He covers some of the motivations for the mass shooters. The Newtown shooter, for example, graphed out the amount of news coverage that resulted compared to the amount of people killed. He hoped to top the number killed in the Norwegian mass shooting by Anders Behring Breivik. Breivik killed 69 people in his mass shooting, and 8 more in a bombing two hours previous to the shooting.
Link to the Public Television YouTube of John Lott:
What the shooters want is publicity. They have decided to commit suicide, but they want to go out with a bang, and they want the world to know of them and their death. In order to gain the attention that the media is so ready to give to them, they attempt to kill as many people as possible.
Dr. Lott does not mention that this is a subset of the "copycat effect" which is well known academically. Clayton Cramer wrote a paper on this in 1993. It was published in a the Journal of Mass Media Ethics, 9:1 [Winter 1993-94]. It won First Place, Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Ethics Prize, 1993, Undergraduate Division. It has been widely written about in other publications, such as the Wall Street Journal. A book, The Copycat Effect, by Loren Coleman, was written in 2004. It detailed simple strategies for mitigating the effect and reducing the number of these mass public killings. They could be implemented without any significant chilling effect on the first amendment. But, cynically, the media opt for ratings over saving lives.
Dr. Lott talks about the experience of Ronald Nobel, the head of Interpol, and how he came to believe that mass shooters, particularly terrorists, cannot be stopped with gun free zones. From abcnews.go.com:
"Societies have to think about how they're going to approach the problem," Noble said. "One is to say we want an armed citizenry; you can see the reason for that. Another is to say the enclaves are so secure that in order to get into the soft target you're going to have to pass through extraordinary security."I was impressed with Dr. Lott's understanding of the issue and his mastery of the facts. The interviewer notes, at one point, that in the testimony in the legislature, Dr. Lott seemed to be the only one who was testifying without emotion.
While the video runs to a little less than 12 minutes, if you are interested in the issues involved with mass shootings, it is 12 minutes well spent.
©2015 by Dean Weingarten: Permission to share is granted when this notice is included.Link to Gun Watch
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