A good guy with a gun, the saying goes, will stop a bad guy with a gun–but as a policy prescription to counter gun violence, the evidence isn’t that strong.
That’s not to say no examples exist, however. A Washington Post blog, “The Volokh Conspiracy,” cites nine credible examples where the mythical “good guy with a gun” stopped a mass shooting.
Eugene Volokh notes that some examples are ambiguous, as it’s difficult to know whether the shooter “had been planning to kill more people when he was stopped.”
Volokh also excluded examples of off-duty police officers or police officers who worked outside the jurisdiction of the shooting, so it’s not a definitive list.
Two of Volokh’s nine examples involved shootings at a school.
Other examples can be found. Some are stopped by average citizens, but they aren’t always mass shootings, and many examples involve police officers, security guards, or others who have firearms training in a professional capacity.
As this writer has previously covered, a 2015 study analyzing the effect that concealed handgun licensing had on crime in four states “found no significant effect of CHL increases on changes in crime rates. This research suggests that the rate at which CHLs are issued and crime rates are independent of one another—crime does not drive CHLs; CHLs do not drive crime.”
Data on mass shootings can be difficult to find. Especially for instances where the shooter is stopped before an incident reaches the threshold for a mass shooting (commonly defined as at least four people are shot), it won’t show up in the data.
A 2013 FBI analysis of active shooter events between 2000 and 2013 found that 49 percent of active shooter events ended before police arrived (51 instances out of 104 attacks). Of 51 instances, victims stopped the attacker 17 (33 percent) times. Three times, a victim shot the attacker, and another 14 times, the shooter was physically subdued. Of those active shooter events, a gun was used by the victims to end the attack .03 percent of the time.
Dr. J. Pete Blair, an FBI research director and associate professor of criminal justice at Texas State University, San Marcos, led the 2013 study. In 2014, Politifact interviewed Blair, who “said it’s logical to assume casualties would be lower when civilians intervene before police arrive, but his research documented very few incidents that were actually stopped because a civilian was carrying a gun.”
The proverbial “good guy with a gun” exists. Almost 13 million Americans have permits for conceal-and-carry, and if Texas is any indication, permit holders are exceedingly law-abiding and commit less crime than the general population.
The problem with the argument is that the “good guy with a gun” tends to be someone who carries a gun in a professional capacity, not just a civilian. Though not a myth, the civilian who stops a shooter is rare.
Anecdotes show that a good guy with a gun have stopped shootings, individual and mass. For policy, however, expanding conceal-and-carry in public places isn’t that effective to stop mass shootings.
