Auditing Shooting Rampage Statistics

[Lorimor]

http://dailyanarchist.com/2012/07/31/auditing-shooting-rampage-statistics/
From the article:

Step Four: Final analysis

With 14 incidents stopped by police with a total of 200 dead that’s an average of about 14.3. With 15 incidents stopped by civilians and 35 dead that’s an average of 2.3.

The first point I want to draw your attention to is that roughly half of shooting rampages end in suicide anyway. What that means is that police are not even in a position to stop most of them. Only the civilians present at the time of the shooting have any opportunity to stop those shooters. That’s probably more important than the statistic itself. In a shooting rampage, counting on the police to intervene at all is a coin flip at best.

Second, within the civilian category 10 of the 15 shootings were stopped by unarmed civilians. What’s amazing about that is that whether armed or not, when a civilian plays hero it seems to save a lot of lives. The courthouse shooting in Tyler, Texas was the only incident where the heroic civilian was killed. In that incident the hero was armed with a handgun and the villain was armed with an assault rifle and body armor. If you compare the average of people killed in shootings stopped by armed civilians and unarmed civilians you get 1.8 and 2.6, but that’s not nearly as significant as the difference between a proactive civilian, and a cowering civilian who waits for police.

So, given that far less people die in rampage shootings stopped by a proactive civilian, only civilians have any opportunity to stop rampage shootings in roughly half of incidents, and armed civilians do better on average than unarmed civilians, wouldn’t you want those heroic individuals who risk their lives to save others to have every tool available at their disposal?

Draw your own conclusions.

[Mudinyeri]

I'm getting a 404 error when I click your link.

The quoted part looks interesting, though.

[Lorimor]

I'm getting a 404 error when I click your link.

The quoted part looks interesting, though.

Fixed it. Thanks!