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Oct. 19, 2010 - InfoWars Special Reports
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20101019_SpecialReport_Alex
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What would you do on your mind if you were there?
How would you react?
What feelings would you have inside of you?
Probably fear.
Fear that someone is on the rampage and that you may be this next target.
Fear that you may or may not escape in time.
Fear that your friends may not be okay even if you made it out.
Fear for your life.
Here we go.
Yet here at public universities in Texas, we are taught to fear a completely different category of people.
People who have gone through extensive paperwork, process, and background checks.
People without any felony or recent quasi-misdemeanor convictions.
People who, according to the Texas Department of Public Safety, are much less likely to commit a crime than the general population.
People who would never ever dream of committing an atrocity such as mass murder.
You would be more likely to die in a fire than be killed by these people.
We are taught to fear the class of law-abiding citizens who peacefully carry a concealed handgun at almost every other unsecured location in Texas.
We fear these people just like we feared them over 10 years ago, when shell issue concealed carry permits was hotly debated in the state legislature.
People feared that these people would cause gunfights over minor traffic incidents or snap and go on a rampage without a moment's notice.
We realize that all the arguments against concealed carry, all the fear about the violence and the surge of violence if we let law-abiding people carry concealed, were ridiculous.
Those who support gun control will argue that the availability of guns and carry permits is a reason for violence and murder in this country.
To quote Jon Stewart, their solution is, quote, then we must get rid of guns.
Guns must go because that is the problem.
Well, that is not the problem.
You know what's the problem?
Crazy is the problem.
And you can't legislate crazy.
Please welcome Dr. John Watts.
Well, thanks.
I appreciate being invited here.
I wish it was under different circumstances.
But it's the basic issue that I was invited to talk about here.
And before I kind of get into the main part of this talk, I just thought I'd mention For the last 15 years I've been doing a lot of work on multiple victim public shootings.
And I've probably talked to more than 100 people at least who have been at these types of events, actually been present when the attacks have started.
And the one feeling that you always get through overwhelmingly when you talk to people who have actually been there in that circumstance is kind of the feeling of utter helplessness that they feel.
And it's quite understandable when there's no way for them to go and protect themselves when this rampage is occurring.
You know, some people go and try to throw books or pillows or chairs or whatever that they have that's available to them, but obviously those types of things turn out to be... All right.
Sure.
Apologize.
But obviously those things aren't equal to the harm that can be done from the guns.
You know, guns make it easier for bad things to happen, but they also make it easier for people to protect themselves and prevent bad things from happening.
So, kind of before we get into the basic question here about campuses, I thought I would talk generally about gun-free zones.
Because in many ways, this has been a major discussion in the United States over the last few years, Two big Supreme Court decisions that have come through, overturning the DC handgun ban as well as the Chicago handgun ban.
And what my research, not only in the new third edition of More Guns Less Crime has shown, but in my earlier books, is that I can't find a place in the world Where we've had a gun ban, and we have crime data both before and after this ban, that we don't see at least some increase in murder rates.
In fact, what we find is, many times, very large increases.
But there's not a single case that you can find, that I believe you can point to, where there's been a significant drop in murder rates.
And you would think, with all the places that have tried gun bans, at least they could point to one example where it's been successful.
But, you know, it's a question I kind of want you to think about generally, is about, you know, can you name one place where we've had a ban?
Because, you know, bans on college campuses is really just a microcosm, one type of example of the types of bans that we have here.
As I say, there's lots of experience with gun bans, gun-free zones.
It's been the center part of Supreme Court decisions of recent years.
I think in the D.C.
and Chicago gun ban cases, Americans generally understand what happened to murder rates after the bans went into effect, that they went up.
And they went up fairly dramatically after the ban had occurred.
The question is, why did that happen?
You know, despite all the predictions, guns are bad.
If we just take guns away, it's going to reduce it.
And it's a basic question that's going to come up when we go more into this example here of gun bans on college campuses.
And that is the question of, who's most likely to obey these laws?
I would argue that when you pass a ban, whether it be on a college campus or you're banning guns in a city or a country, it's basically the good, law-abiding citizens who are the ones who turn in their guns.
Not the criminals.
And to the extent that you disarm law-abiding good citizens and not the criminals, you can have a perverse impact and actually increase the crime rates.
And I suppose the simplest way to think about this, before we get into a lot of the data here, and that is, let's say someone was stalking you or your family, was really stalking your wife, let's say.
Would you feel safer putting a sign up in front of your home that said, this home is a gun-free zone?
Would that make you feel safer to go and announce that?
My guess is most people wouldn't feel safer doing that.
And the reason why they wouldn't feel safer for doing that is, I think, pretty obvious, because they're essentially telling the criminals, or that person who's stalking their family, that that stalker has less to worry about.
That they don't have to worry about the people being able to defend themselves.
And that rather than actually deterring The person with the weapon from entering the house.
What he'll actually do is make it more likely that he'll do it.
That these types of signs actually serve as a magnet for causing these types of attacks to occur.
And what I would argue is that for places like the UT campus, we actually have these signs almost up in neon, essentially, telling everybody that when it comes to the University of Texas campus or other schools, That concealed handguns that the potential victims that they face aren't going to be armed.
Now, you know, we'll go through the data for D.C.
and Chicago in a second, but there's some who go and argue that these aren't really fair tests.
Gun control proponents say, okay, it didn't work exactly right, but that's because we didn't have a gun ban across the entire country.
It was possible for criminals to go and get guns from other areas and bring them into the places where the gun ban was true.
I would bring two points.
One is that it would have been nice if they had shared it with everybody else, that they didn't think that these were fair tests to have.
But the second point is that these results, these increases in murders and other violent crimes, aren't just limited to Chicago and D.C.
Around the world, time after time, in Places where the entire nation adopts these bans, or even island nations where they don't have any nearby neighbor that they can go and blame for being a source of guns, also see increases in murder rates and other types of violent crime.
You know, there are many areas of U.S.
life where we have these types of gun bans or have had them.
Often what I find when I talk to people is they kind of assume that whatever law is currently in place is the way the law has always been.
So, for example, after 9-11 I consulted a lot with the airline pilots unions about being able to have pilots carry guns on planes.
And often in the discussion you'd hear similar types of stories to what's being brought up now where they'd say, well, you know, what happens if a pilot accidentally fires a gun?
Or what happens if a pilot, you know, Go berserk, or what have you.
Other potential hypothetical things that might occur.
Well, my response, after working with the pilots unions, there's so many things that you find out that you just never knew were true.
So, for example, most of you probably don't know that all commercial airline pilots in the United States from 1924 up until 1963 were mandated to carry a loaded handgun with them when they flew in the United States.
They were allowed to carry handguns with them up until 1979.
Where, according to the pilot's unions, regularly about 10% of pilots still carry their handguns with them.
And yet, with all that experience, over all those decades, the FAA has not one single record of anything going wrong with all those pilots carrying concealed handguns.
You would think that there would be at least one story, but there's not.
When people would bring up hypothetical cases about things that might happen, I thought the best argument would be to say, well, what did happen when we had this experience?
You know, things like whether we should have guns on college campuses.
Most people think, well, because we have bans now, wasn't that always the case?
And in fact, this is a relatively new phenomenon.
These types of rules and restrictions only go back about 16, 17 years or so.
seventeen years or so. Prior to that, there were no restrictions on virtually any college
campuses around the country banning people carrying concealed handguns or other guns
on campus.
And in fact, a lot of states have right to carry laws.
And people with those permits had no restrictions, whether they were faculty or staff or students, as long as they met the requirements and were able to carry the guns on the college campuses.
And yet, prior to that period of time, despite all that experience in all those states, again, I can't find a single example of something going wrong on one of those campuses.
Now, since then, we still have states, Colorado and Utah, have laws on the books that say that on public campuses, people can carry permanent concealed handguns.
There are many college campuses around the country that are able to do it, because most states leave it up to the schools to decide.
But, you know, there are, probably most schools ban it when they have a choice for students.
But my guess is, and we've gone through this systematically, most schools allow faculty or staff to carry concealed handguns because, at least in the samples that I've been able to go through with faculty handbooks, you don't see restrictions applying to them that apply to the students.
And again, as we mentioned, this is other countries.
So what I thought I'd show you is just some data from DC.
and Chicago here.
This is murder rates for D.C.
relative to other cities in the top 50 cities.
Before I go through this for a second, I just want to tell you a couple things.
D.C.' 's handgun ban went into effect in February 1977 after a restraining order that had been imposed by the courts were removed.
D.C.' 's murder rates in the year prior to the ban
Among these top 50 cities range from about rank 20th to 15th.
In the 30 years after the ban was imposed, DC's murder rate ranked number one or number two among the 50 largest cities half the time and ranked in the top four two-thirds of the time.
So it was a dramatic increase, not only relative to DC's past murder rate, but also relative to other cities.
This just compares the ratio of DC's murder rate to the average For the other 48 cities, Chicago's also dropped out just because it also imposes a ban, but including it because it's just one city has no real impact on these lines.
DC's murder rate was falling relative to other cities prior to the ban.
Basically, it goes down to about 10% above the other cities in 76.
And then afterwards, it soars.
I mean, it goes from about 10% above to about 45% above the murder rate in other cities.
It basically stays there afterwards.
I could go and show you for periods of time after 87 where the reason why I showed you just this is you have 40-50% increases here.
They look tiny compared to how DC's murder rate soared relative to other cities after the crack cocaine epidemic hit.
This is DC's murder rate relative to Maryland and Virginia.
You can see it's Rising afterwards, there's no year after the ban where it's lower than it was before the ban.
And again, this is continuing out.
This is D.C.' 's murder rate relative to the U.S.
and again, carrying out.
Now one thing that's gotten very little attention is while people may understand how D.C.' 's murder rate went up after the ban, there's almost no coverage about how it's fallen after the Supreme Court struck down the ban.
About two weeks ago, the FBI came out with its new Uniform Crime Report numbers for 2009.
And what you can see is that last year, Washington, D.C.' 's murder rate fell by 23 percent compared to 2008.
Nationally, murder rates fell by about 7%.
If you look at just cities over 500,000 population, which would be kind of D.C.' 's class, they fell by about 8%.
So D.C.' 's murder rate fell by about three times faster last year than the national average, going down to a rate of about 23.5 per 100,000 people.
That's D.C.' 's lowest rate since 1967.
per hundred thousand people. That's DC's lowest rate since 1967. And if you go beyond that,
you know, we can go and look to see what's happened even this year.
The drop has continued.
So what I've done in this chart is just compare it for the first seven months of the year because I have all the different crime data for the first seven months.
Crimes vary over the course of the year.
A lot more crimes during the summer and not so much during winters.
So you want to compare apples to apples.
So this is the first seven months of 07, 08, 09, and 010.
And you can see The first seven months of 07, 104 murders, 08, 107, and then last year fell to 82, and then this year it's gone down to 69.
So that's a 36% drop in two years that we've seen in D.C.
I can only guess if D.C.
had seen a 36% increase in murders and other violent crimes after the handgun ban had been eliminated.
That would be major news coverage.
But the fact that we've seen this huge drop that's not seen in the rest of the United States has gotten virtually no news coverage.
And you can also compare it to other violent crimes.
If you look at robbery with guns that fell by over 10%, about 11%.
Robberies without guns fell by 3%.
Aggregate assaults with guns fell by 24%.
Aggravated assaults without guns fell by 8%.
So crimes with guns, despite the ban being eliminated and the gun lock rules being stopped, fell by about three times faster than crimes without guns.
And you can look at Chicago here.
Chicago's ban went into effect in November 1982.
You can see Chicago's murder rate relative to other top 10 cities was falling prior to the ban.
Basically reached a minimum right before the ban was started and then it rose and it basically continued to rise.
You can compare it to the other 50 largest cities.
Again, similar pattern.
You can look at it compared to the five counties that are adjacent to Chicago.
Chicago's murder rate was falling, and then as soon as the ban was imposed, it started
to rise relative to the adjacent counties.
Not all the counties report crime data for 84, so there's missing value there, but you
can see, obviously, there's a change that occurred there, and you can look at it compared
to the United States as a whole.
Murder rates were clearly falling in Chicago relative to the United States, right up until
was imposed and that it increased.
Very substantial increase, even right away after the ban was imposed.
Now, you know, I'm not going to go and argue that any one particular country proves a lot here.
Lots of other factors that one can talk about here, but at least, and I do try to control for the hundreds of factors that I control for my book, More Guns Less Crime, but even after controlling for them, you still see Chicago and Washington, D.C.
showing these increases.
I'm just trying to show you very simple comparisons by showing how their murder rates, and I can show you their violent crime rates, rose relative to other similar cities.
Well, how about around the world?
How about island nations?
I'll just show you a few graphs from island nations here after they had their ban.
Ireland's ban went into effect at the beginning of 1972.
And you can see, prior to the ban, Ireland's murder rate was pretty much bouncing down around here.
Just, you know, between .1 and .6 per 100,000 people.
Right up until the ban went into effect, and then it soared up, and obviously at a much higher rate after the ban than it was before.
You can see a similar pattern for Jamaica.
Now, obviously, somebody can go on point, too.
They can say, well, we have worse drug wars afterwards than before, and I'm more than happy to say that there are differences that are occurring here.
But it surely didn't stop the problems that they were having there.
And the fact that this Even if you think you can come up with a story in one or two of these places, the fact that it's so consistent should be concerning.
And here's England and Wales.
You can see their handgun ban went into effect in January 1997.
Murder rates were fairly, homicides were fairly flat right up until then.
And then they gradually started to rise.
There's been some reduction in the last year.
In 2009, the data just came out.
But it's still above what it was before the ban was instituted on per capita rate.
So, we've talked a little bit about who obeys these gun-free zones.
So I kind of skipped that, but Bill Landis at the University of Chicago and I looked at all the multiple victim public shootings from 1977 through 1999.
My third edition of More Guns Less Crime updates that discussion some.
But there are a couple of interesting things I think we found.
One of the things is that law enforcement, while law enforcement is probably the key, police in particular, are the key factor for controlling crime generally, they seem to have virtually no effect on multiple victim public shootings.
No statistically significant effect.
And the question is why?
And we think we have a pretty simple answer for what's going on there.
And that is, when you look at this, 75% of these guys who committed these multiple victim public shootings died at the crime scene.
Either by committing suicide or being killed by somebody else who has a gun.
And in interviews that have been done with at least a lot of the 25% who live, one of the common things that come out is even they expected to die.
What happened was they just weren't able to go and bring themselves to commit suicide when they actually had to go and do it.
They couldn't actually kill themselves.
So why is this important for what impact law enforcement has?
You know, arrest rates, conviction rates, prison sentence lengths, the death penalty, all those affect murder rates generally or other violent crimes.
The reason why they don't affect these multiple victim load shootings is because law enforcement works by punishing people after the fact.
And if people believe with virtual certainty that they're going to die before they engage in these
attacks, the fact that you're threatening them
with more certain or more severe punishment afterwards really doesn't do very much to them
in terms of convincing them not to do it.
Now, one of the things that was also interesting is the huge impact Bill and I found from right to carry
laws on multiple public students.
We looked at 13 different types of gun control laws.
We had demographic variables, poverty, income, education, you name it.
Hundreds of factors that were there.
But of the 13 types of gun control laws that we looked at, the only one that seemed to have any statistical impact on multiple victim public shootings was the passage of Right to Carry laws.
And it was huge.
Basically, after states passed these laws, there's about a 60% drop in the number of multiple victim public shootings, the rate.
And there's a 79% drop in the rate at which people were killed or injured from these attacks.
But if you look at murders generally, there's only about a 1.5% drop in murder rates for each additional year that the laws are in effect.
Why is it so much bigger for this particular type of crime?
And again, it's pretty simple.
It's just a question of deterrence.
What I and other researchers find is that as the probability that you're going to be able to stop a criminal increases, you can see them commit less crimes.
And so in this case, let's say I have 5% of the adult population with concealed handgun permits.
If you're talking about a place that, you know, in a dark alley or a parking lot where there's one victim and a criminal comes up to them, that represents some risk to the criminal and you see some deterrence.
You know, in this room, I suppose, what, we have like 120 people or 100 plus people in this room and the overflow in the back?
Even if there was only a couple percent chance that any one individual here had a concealed handgun permit, you know, assuming the probabilities were independent, what would be the probability that at least one person would have a concealed handgun?
Probability would be 100%, right?
100%, right?
And in fact, it'd probably be over 100% that you'd have more than two people with permanent concealment
guns, two people who would be unknown to the attacker about whether or not the people were
going to be able to go and defend themselves or not.
So you see this much greater reduction in the rate at which these crimes occur compared
to murders generally, simply because the probability that somebody's going to be there to stop these attacks
is so much greater.
Now, I just want to say, what seems to be in these warped minds of people who go and do
these attacks is they want to commit suicide.
And in committing suicide, they want to do it in some way that's going to go and get attention for themselves.
So they like the fact that, you know, people will be talking about them or showing them attention after they die.
And you see this over and over again when you read The notes, or diaries, or other things that these guys leave behind.
And that is, they care about the amount of attention.
They know how much attention other attacks have gotten in the past.
They know that they're more likely to get more attention in the press the more people they kill or injure.
And many of these warped minds, their goal is, if they can get more killings than past attacks have done, then they're going to be guaranteed More news coverage and kind of a note in the history books that they otherwise wouldn't have gotten.
And so there are issues here about how news coverage and other things affect the rate at which these attacks occur.
Now there's some other things we can bring up here.
One of the things that I think is very interesting is to look at Israel.
You know, Israel has had a long history of terrorist attacks, obviously.
Look at the policies that they followed in the 40s, 50s, 60s, and very early 1970s.
What they tried to do was to put more police or more military on the street with the notion that if they just flooded the area with enough uniformed people with guns, that would stop these attacks from occurring.
But the problem that they eventually realized was that was a hopeless goal.
And the reason why it was is because terrorists have a huge strategic advantage in engaging in these
attacks.
And that strategic advantage is they have the control over when the attack occurs.
And so let's say you're on a bus, a terrorist is on a bus, and you have two police officers
or two soldiers that are on the bus.
What are the two options that the terrorist has?
The terrorist can either outweigh the soldiers.
Soldiers could be on there for six hours, and then as soon as they leave, the terrorist
could go and engage in the attack.
Or if the terrorist doesn't want to wait, those two people would be the first people
that they would kill.
Because if they killed those, then they would know that the other people on the bus wouldn't be able to go and resist the attack.
And so, Israel just kept on spending more and more money on trying to kind of flood the area with cops.
But they eventually realized that there was no way that they were going to be able to cover all potential
vulnerable targets.
Because if the terrorists were just patient and waited long enough, they would find some places,
some bus, some mall, some place where there weren't police officers there for a few minutes,
where they would be able to go and engage in their attack.
And so what they did was, in 72, they changed the rules and allowed Israeli citizens to go and carry concealed handguns.
Right now, about 15% of the adult Jewish population in Israel is allowed to carry concealed handguns.
And whenever there's an increase in terrorist attacks, the National Police Chief in Israel will go on the media and basically urge Those who are able to carry concealed handguns to make sure that they do so all the time when they're traveling around, because they never know when they're going to be able to use them.
Now there is an interesting thing that happened.
And that is, if you look at terrorist attacks over time in Israel, what you'll find is that all the time up until 72, virtually all the terrorist attacks involved machine guns.
After 1972, virtually all of them involved bombs.
There was no technological change that occurred right then in terms of being able to build bombs.
But what happened was is that machine guns appeared to be their preferred method of attack because they had a choice to use both beforehand.
But what changed was is that when you pull out a machine gun, you give the option for those around you to respond to your attack.
There was one There's a newspaper story that made a big impact on me about a terrorist attack shortly after the change in the law in 1972, where four armed terrorists attacked a mall in Tel Aviv.
They pulled out their machine guns, started firing, and people in the crowd around them pulled out their handguns and started firing back at the terrorists.
Three of the terrorists were killed, one was severely injured, and when he was being taken to the hospital in an ambulance, The attendants in the ambulance reported to the newspaper
that the terrorist was very upset.
He was just unconsolable. That no one had told him that the old ladies in the mall there would be having handguns.
And he had to be serious. He had to be serious. He had to be told not to have handguns.
These older ladies, because it was just in the afternoon, it was during work hours, they were the ones
doing the shopping, were the ones who pulled out their handguns and started firing.
Does anybody know where the two worst high school shootings in the world were?
Yeah, there was one in England, wasn't there?
Well, there was an elementary school shooting in England, but they were in Germany.
In the last decade, the two worst public school shootings have been in Germany.
One involved 18, the other one 17 fatalities.
But there are a lot of attacks that occur in Europe.
You've had, I think it was 10 that were killed about a year ago in Finland in a school.
You go through these, you find multiple victim public shootings in France, You find, even in Switzerland, this last decade you had one case where 14 people were killed in a parliamentary building of a canton of Zug.
But there's one common feature that these places have, and that they were all gun-free zones.
And what you find is that if you actually look at the rate per capita of multiple victim public shootings in Europe, For if only more than four people killed, Europe's per capita rate is very similar to what it is in the United States.
Even despite the fact that they have very strict gun laws in places like Germany or France or other places where you have to go through long licensing and psychological screening tests, rules that go well beyond what's been advocated for anybody here, at least in the main debate, on the issue of gun control.
I think part of what goes on, because I get calls from media around the world when there are attacks in the United States, and they often will ask me things like, well, why does the United States have so many of these attacks?
And when I get calls from countries like Germany or whatever, I'll just remind them of the history of these attacks that they've had in this last decade, and they usually have forgotten about them until they're mentioned to them.
You know, we have laws around the country.
We have only two states in the United States that still ban people being able to carry concealed handguns, Illinois and Wisconsin.
And there's a good chance that at least one and possibly both of those states will change their laws after this election.
And we have 40 states with right-to-carry laws like Texas does.
Eight states which have more restrictive main issue right-to-carry laws.
I mean, once you meet certain objective criteria, you're a certain age, you apply for a permit, you pass a criminal background check, you meet the training requirements if there are any, and the permit's automatically granted.
The eight in many states may have those rules, but then in addition, they may also require that you get permission from some local public official by demonstrating that you have a certain need to go and carry the permit concealed handgun.
Now, Just as an aside, Texas actually has a relatively restrictive right to carry law.
You have about, as I mentioned before, over 410,000 people right now in the state with concealed carry permits.
Compared to something like Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania has less than half the population that Texas has, but they have, I guess, about 720,000 people right now with concealed carry permits.
Why do they have Not quite twice as many with half the population.
And the reason is very simple.
It has to do with the differences in the laws.
In Texas, to get a concealed handgun permit, if you're under 65, you've got to pay $140.
You have to undergo 10 hours of training.
You have to undergo 10 hours of training to renew your permit.
In Pennsylvania, it's about a $20 fee to go and get your permit.
And there's no training requirement.
Plus, Texas has still a relatively long list, including campuses, where you're not allowed to go and carry a permit-concealed handgun.
Pennsylvania has no such list.
The only places that are excluded are places which are banned under federal law.
And, you know, you see these rules have a big impact.
You charge more, fewer people get permits, but it also changes the mix of people who get permits.
On concealed carry, it indicates to me that the people who benefit the most from concealed carry are basically poor blacks who live in high-crime urban areas.
And when you go and you raise a fee, not only do you have fewer people getting permits, but you also see a mix in the type of people who get permits.
You basically squeeze out, particularly, those people who benefit the most from having a permit.
And, you know, this is the type of issue that I think is going to come up more with like The DC and Chicago new gun laws with the huge fees that they have for people being able to go and get permits.
The Washington Post did a study a little while ago which claimed that it took about $500 for them to go through the process to register a handgun.
And so that basically means to me it's basically only going to be fairly wealthy individuals who are going to be able to go and get the permits, not the people who would benefit the most from having a gun to be able to go and protect themselves.
Now one of the reasons why I think people have the perceptions that they do about concealed carry and kind of concerns about campuses is due to media coverage.
Most people get their information about guns from the news media.
And when was the last time you listened to the National Evening News broadcast and heard a story about somebody using a gun to protect themselves or protect somebody else?
My guess is it's probably pretty hard for you to recall such a story.
But probably without trying at all, you can recall what seem to be hundreds or even thousands of stories of bad things that have happened with guns.
You know, the FBI has something called the National Crime Victimization Survey, where they survey about 100-150,000 people each year to try to get information on the number of crimes that occur.
Because we could just go and look at gun crimes reported to police, In any given year, there are about 200,000 to 250,000 gun crimes reported to police.
The problem is, a lot of crimes are never reported to police.
So, for example, rape.
Only about half of rapes are reported to police.
Well, how do we know that only half, or think that only half of rapes are reported to police?
We have these large surveys that can go and estimate how many rapes occur, and then compare it to how many are reported.
Well, we do the same thing with guns, and so rather than the reported 200,000 to 250,000, we find that the surveys indicate that there are about 400,000 to 450,000 gun crimes a year.
Twice as much is what we're reporting.
Good reason to go and do the survey.
But those same types of surveys indicate that Americans use guns defensively about two million times a year.
So that means Americans use guns defensively about four to five times more frequently to stop crimes Then they use them to commit crimes.
But my guess is, if we were going to go ask most people about that, they'd think the ratio goes in the opposite direction, maybe even more lopsided in the other direction.
And that's because they get their notions of the costs and benefits of guns from listening to the media.
And if you only hear about bad things that happen, and never hear about the benefits, it's not too surprising that they come to those conclusions.
Now, one thing I can say in the defense of media, You know, it's a key fact.
About 95% of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish it for the criminal to break off an attack.
Rarely is the criminal killed fewer than one out of every thousand times than people who use guns defensively.
So let's say you're editor of a news bureau, and you have two stories that come across your desk.
One where there's a dead body on the ground, a sympathetic person like a victim.
And another case where let's say a woman's brandished a gun, the criminal's run away, no shots are fired, no dead body on the ground, no crime actually committed, you're not even sure what crime might have been committed if it hadn't been stopped.
Which story is more newsworthy?
I think anybody in this room would honestly have to say that the first story is much more newsworthy than the second.
We may care about both stories from a policy perspective, but in terms of what the media should cover, it explains, I think, a lot about why they cover the things that they cover there.
I don't think that explains all of it, though, because when you talk about these types of multiple victim public shootings, There's a particular type of bias that exists.
My guess is, for example, that relatively few people know that over 25% of the multiple victim public school shootings have been stopped by citizens well before uniformed police were able to arrive.
And the reason why they're unlikely to know that is that when those cases occur, only about 1% of the news stories on those incidents will mention that fact.
If you look at when police stopped multiple victim public shootings, about 34% of the news stories will mention how those attacks ended.
So, for example, if you look at the first of the public school shootings in October 1997 at Pearl Mississippi High School, if you go and do a Nexus search, this was originally supposed to be sponsored by the Federalist Society, which Would have been all lawyers in law school.
So they would know this, but there's something called Nexus or Westlaw.
If you use a Nexus search, what you can find in the one month after that attack, you'd see 687 separate news stories about the incident.
Of those 687, basically what happened was there was an assistant principal there at the school, a former Marine, had a permit to carry a concealed handgun, Apparently, regularly, up until the end of 1995 when the Safe School Zone Act was passed.
He regularly kept his handgun with him on school property.
After the ban was passed, he would park his car more than a thousand feet off of school property in order to obey the law.
And when the attack started that day, he literally had to run a half mile to get his gun and a half mile back.
But he still was able to hold the attacker at point blank range on the ground for over five and a half minutes before the police arrived.
The attacker was in the process of leaving the high school to go across the street to the middle school where he was going to continue his attack.
Now, there were 687 separate news stories.
Nineteen of them will mention the assistant principal in any way.
Thirteen of the nineteen mentioned that the assistant principal had something to do with stopping the attack, and ten of the thirteen mentioned that he used his gun to stop the attack.
Eight of those news stories were in local media near where the attack had occurred, but two of them were on national news.
One was on ABC World News Now at 4 a.m.
This is kind of the over-the-night ABC news broadcast.
And the other one was on a show they used to have on CNN, CNN Early Pride, that played about 3 o'clock in the afternoon.
But those were the only 10 mentions.
And I can go through attack after attack, and you regularly will see about only 1% of those news stories will mention that that's the case.
And I think it has a big impact on people's perceptions.
I've talked to people in the media, I do work for people in the media, and I've tried to get them to go and mention things like, did these attacks, these multiple victim public shootings attacks occur in gun-free zones?
Because essentially what you find is that all the multiple victim public shootings involving four or more victims always occur, when they're in public, in gun-free zones.
And I think it would make some difference in the debate after a while, if even once in a while, The media would say, and another one of these attacks, just like the one today, fortunately nobody was killed, occurred in a place where permanent concealed handguns are not allowed.
But I think these things have a big impact.
Now one of the questions is, what about the behavior of permit holders?
You know, because the concern is, you let people carry permanent concealed handguns, they're going to have accidents, they're going to go and commit crimes themselves.
And in fact, what you find is that permit holders tend to be extremely law-abiding.
I don't know if you guys can read these things, but my book, the third edition of More Guns, Less Crime, which came out this summer, goes through the data for 25 states and the text and footnotes, but I can just go through some of the stuff here.
Let me mention Florida, for example.
Between October 1st, 1987 and August 31st, 2010, Florida had issued permits to over 1.8 million people.
About 1.84 million people.
Many of those people have renewed them multiple times.
On average, renewed them about two and a half times.
That means on average, the average permit holder had their permits for over 12 years.
And of those people, 167 have had their permits revoked for any type of firearms related violation.
They don't go through it on the website, but I've called up the people who put together the statistics, and they tell me that that overwhelmingly tends to be people who accidentally carry a concealed handgun into a gun-free zone, like a school or airport or something.
But that's one one-hundredth of one percentage point.
Now, another way you can look at it is over the last 32 months, since January 2008, There have been four additional permit holders who have had their permits revoked for any firearms-related violation.
They have over 750,000 active permit holders in Florida.
That comes to an annual revocation rate of 0.0002%.
I would argue it's pretty hard to find virtually any other population that has as low of any type of, you know, and again, most of these are fairly trivial violations that are there.
You know, an example of somebody who carried a concealed handgun into an airport, which you guys may know about, is Barry Switzer.
You know, some years ago, when he used to be coach for the Dallas Cowboys, for any football fans that hear trivia, he was late for a team game, ran into the airport, forgot he had a concealed handgun on him, buzzers went off, gets arrested, couldn't make it to the team plane.
But, you know, it's true the Cowboys were having a bad year.
But I don't think anybody really viewed Barry Switzer as a real public safety threat that was there.
He simply forgot that he had the handgun with him.
And that's, when you're talking about millions of people with permits, that happens.
Right now, my guess is, for the numbers, because I can't get it for all the states, and we can talk about that, because not all states require permits, but of the states that do require permits, and some states or counties, and I didn't call up all the hundred counties in some of these states to track down the numbers, but for the states where you are able to get numbers, it's basically about, a little bit over 6.2 million Americans now, right now, are legally licensed to carry permit-concealed handguns.
A lot of people.
And if you look at Texas in 2009, there's a little bit over 400,000 people with active licenses.
Now the last year the Department of Public Safety has detailed breakdowns for the behavior of permit holders was 2007.
They had about 290,000 active permit holders then.
160 were convicted for either misdemeanors or felonies.
Overwhelmingly, these are misdemeanors, but overall it's a rate of about 0.05%, so about five hundredths of one percentage point.
That's about one-seventh the rate of convictions for the general population, but again, the general population is more likely to commit felonies than these permit holders were.
And the most frequent type of revocation, 29 of these 160 cases involve Carrying a weapon without a license.
You know, just like when you drive, you gotta have your driver's license with you.
Sometimes people forget to have their wallet or their license with them, and they get into trouble.
But that's by far the biggest category.
The next largest category was 24 cases of domestic violence.
None of those involved a weapon being used of any type, let alone a gun.
But over the preceding five years, from 2002 to 2006, The average rate that they were convicted of misdemeanors or felonies was 0.04%.
So we could go through that more, but I think it gives you a pretty good idea of the breakdown.
Now I know you guys are going to have some questions, so let me just kind of summarize here.
And that is, my research convinces me that police are the single most important factor for various crime.
But I think one thing that police understand themselves is that they virtually always arrive on the crime scene after the crime has been committed.
And that raises the question about what you recommend that somebody do when they're having to defend themselves against a criminal.
And simply telling people to behave passively turns out to be pretty bad advice.
Having a gun is consistently, according to the National Crime Victimization Survey by
the Department of Justice, is consistently by far the safest course of action for people
to take.
You know, there's a statement that's often out there, and there's a kernel of truth to
it, but I think it's very misleading.
And that is, if you compare passive behavior to all forms of active resistance together, passive behavior is slightly safer, though it's not really statistically significantly different.
But the problem is, and the reason why it's misleading, is that under the heading of active resistance, you're lumping together all sorts of different things.
Some which are much safer than passive behavior, and some which are much more dangerous.
So, for example, it includes everything From yelling, running away, using your fist, using a baseball bat, mace, a knife, a stun gun, or a gun.
For example, for women, by far the most dangerous course for a woman to take when she's confronted by a criminal is to use her fist.
There's a very simple reason for that, and that is you're virtually always talking about a male doing the attack.
And for a woman to go and use her fist, there's very likely to be a physical response back from the attacker.
And given that, a high probability of either serious injury or death.
The second most dangerous course of action, again, much, much more dangerous than passive behavior, is to run away.
If women succeed in running away, that's great.
But unfortunately, women tend to be significantly slower runners than men, particularly for the age groups which are most likely to engage in the violent crime.
Anyway, if you break down these different categories, you find, rather than lumping everything together, You find that using guns is by far the safest course of action.
And as I mentioned before, the other group, so there's basically two groups.
There's women, the elderly, people who are relatively weak or physically benefit the most from owning guns, and also the people who are most likely to be victims of guns, which are basically, unfortunately, going to be one very concentrated group in this country, and that's poor blacks who live in high crime urban areas.
So basically, it's the most vulnerable people in our In light of today's events, could you expand upon some more examples of some of the multi-crime victim events that were stopped by law-abiding citizens with their own violence?
Oh sure.
Well, I mean there are lots of them.
A lot of them never even get much news attention because many times they get stopped before they get, you know, anybody gets killed.
But, you know, you can go through, since I was supposed to give the talk originally in the law school today, I'll give one example from the law school.
At the Appalachian Law School, about eight years ago, there was an attack in which three people were killed.
I actually gave a talk there a few years ago.
They invited me to come there.
It was pretty interesting to go and talk to the people who had been present at the attack.
But what happened was two students there at the school who were outside when the attack started to occur, one of them a former deputy sheriff from North Carolina in a different state, both of them had concealed carry firearms in Virginia since they were living there at the time, ran to their cars, got their handguns, came back, pointed their guns at the attacker, A third student tackled him, and the three of them held him on the ground for 11 and a half minutes before the police arrived.
Again, I could go through the news media coverage on that.
It's actually kind of interesting, because if you do a Nexus search on that, in the one week after that attack, you'll find 218 separate news stories.
Only three news stories actually mention that the students used their guns to stop the attack.
Typically, you'd see discussions about Students tackled the attacker, or subdued the attacker, or pounced on the attacker, or that they held them until the police arrived.
All of which were true, though I would go and argue it's fairly misleading and actually dangerous because they somehow gave the impression that running across an open field in order to go and attack somebody who's armed is likely to be successful.
But anyway, I was on a radio show.
Larry Elder, who's a friend of mine, used to have a national radio show based out of Los Angeles.
And he had invited Tracy Bridges, one of the two students who had stopped the attack on.
And Tracy had mentioned that he had talked to at least 50 reporters the day of the attack.
And also the other student had talked to a lot, too.
But being a law school student, having access to Nexus and Westlaw, he wanted to see
what everybody wrote about him.
So he'd gone and looked it up the next day.
And he couldn't find himself in all the quotes and discussions
about the fact.
So I thought he was exaggerating a little bit.
And so I decided to go and call up 50 reporters.
I didn't know which ones he had talked to.
And I just wanted to know, did they know about the facts there, and all of them knew about it?
And then I asked them, did they talk to either of the students?
And all but three of them had talked to either one or both the students who had used
their guns to stop the attack.
And so I asked them then, well why is it that you don't mention this in your story?
You mentioned being pounced on, or tackled, or whatever.
And Maria Glide at the Washington Post gave me the explanation, which to the extent I was able to get an explanation, She gave me, and she said she only had a little bit over 900 words to do the story.
And she simply didn't have the space to get into it.
She had two paragraphs on the type of gun that was being used.
But my note to you all is, you know, you think about the media bias, and before I try to explain why most news coverage is not media bias, it's understandable why they're not newsworthy stories, okay?
Because nothing bad happened.
Here are stories which are already getting national and international news, and yet how it ended, when a citizen used their gun to stop it, isn't reported in those stories.
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