Month: November 2022
by John R. Lott Jr.
With crime such an important issue, Americans depend on the FBI for accurate data. The crime data for 2021 is a mess, with almost 40% of law enforcement agencies around the country not submitting any data to the FBI. In California, 93% didn’t report crime data. In New York, 87% didn’t. Cities are embarrassed by the soaring crime rates, and even when they have collected the data they aren’t transmitting those numbers to the FBI.
But many more data errors are the direct responsibility of the FBI. Up until January of last year, I worked in the U.S. Department of Justice as the senior advisor for research and statistics, and part of my job was to evaluate the FBI’s active shooting reports. I found that they were missing lots of cases and had misidentified others. Unfortunately, the FBI was unwilling to fix any of these errors. Since leaving that job, I have found many more missed cases, updating the list this month.
Nor was that the first time I pointed out such errors to the FBI, and I published a list of them in a criminology publication in 2015.
These news reports relied on a series of FBI reports on active shootings put together by researchers at Texas State University.
The FBI reports that armed citizens stopped only 11 of the 252 active shooter incidents that it identified for the period 2014-2021. The FBI defines active shooter incidents as those in which an individual actively kills or attempts to kill people in a populated, public area. But it does not include shootings that are deemed related to other criminal activity, such as robbery or fighting over drug turf. Active shootings may involve just one shot being fired at just one target, even if the target isn’t hit.
To compile its list, the FBI hired academics at the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State University. Police departments don’t collect data, so the researchers had to find news stories about these incidents.
My organization, the Crime Prevention Research Center, also undertook a search for news stories. The CPRC discovered a total of 360 active shooter incidents from 2014 to 2021, and it found that an armed citizen stopped 124 of these. I also found that the FBI had misidentified five cases, usually because the person who stopped the attack was incorrectly identified as a security guard. We found these cases on a tiny budget of just a few thousand dollars. Though we found that armed citizens had stopped 11 times more cases than the FBI reports, I make no claim that we have identified all of them. It is quite possible that the news media itself never covers many such incidents.
But no one needs to take my word for it that the FBI missed many cases. All of the news stories that my team collected are listed on the CPRC website.
While the FBI claims that just 4.4% of active shootings were stopped by law-abiding citizens carrying guns, the percentage that I found was 34%. I am more confident that we have identified a higher percentage of recent cases, and the percentage in 2021 was even higher – 49%.
The FBI doesn’t differentiate between law-abiding citizens stopping attacks where guns are banned and where they are allowed, but you can’t really expect law-abiding citizens to stop attacks where it is illegal to carry guns. In places where law-abiding citizens are allowed to carry firearms, the percentage of active shootings stopped is above 50% for the whole period. And, again, we are more confident that we have more of the cases in recent years. The figure hits 58% in 2021.
In order to follow the FBI’s definition, I also had to exclude 24 cases because a law-abiding person with a gun stopped the attacker before he was able to get off a shot.
But there is a more basic problem in the reliance on news coverage to determine whether an active shooting was stopped by an armed civilian. The news media has a clear bias to cover cases where bad things happen over cases where bad things are prevented. The old adage is: “If it bleeds, it leads.” Killings are usually more newsworthy than woundings, and woundings more notable than confrontations defused simply by someone brandishing a gun.
As an example, I examined news stories of defensive gun use data from Jan. 1 to Aug. 10 of this year, and found 774 defensive gun uses, fully 85% involving people shot: 43% resulting in death and 42% in wounding. Less than 4% of cases involved no shots fired. But survey data indicate that in 95% of cases when people use guns defensively, they merely show the gun to make the criminal back off. Such defensive gun uses rarely make the news.
The problem is that the FBI numbers are used by academics who do research and by the media. To see how the FBI reports alter news coverage, see the July 17 Greenwood Mall shooting near Indianapolis, where a young man, Elisjsha Dicken, used his legally carried gun to stop what clearly would have been a horrible mass public shooting. The news coverage immediately relied on the FBI and Texas State University reports to tell people Dicken’s heroism was very unusual.
“Making Dicken’s heroism perhaps even more remarkable is the fact cases of an armed bystander attacking an active shooter are rare,” CNN noted two days after the attack. “The Greenwood incident is unique, however, because it became one of the rare instances of an armed civilian successfully intervening to end a mass shooting,” claimed the Washington Post the day after the attack. But what is really rare is the news coverage of these attacks. Few know that there were at least six other similar likely mass public shootings that armed civilians stopped in the first nine months of this year.
It is hard to ignore how all of this feeds into the gun control debate. Nor can one forget about the charges of political bias leveled by whistleblowers in the FBI.
The FBI is systematically missing defensive gun uses. And it has failed to fix these errors, even when I have pointed them out. Considering how often the media cites the FBI as an authoritative source, this institution needs to do better.
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John R. Lott Jr. is a contributor to RealClearInvestigations, focusing on voting and gun rights. His articles have appeared in publications such as the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, New York Post, USA Today, and Chicago Tribune. Lott is an economist who has held research and/or teaching positions at the University of Chicago, Yale University, Stanford, UCLA, Wharton, and Rice.
Photo “FBI Building” by Ken Lund. CC BY-SA 2.0.
“What do you need all those guns for, anyway?”
Many the gun nerd’s dreams have been crushed by that simple query. I have myself fielded that very question on numerous occasions. I like to think I’ve gotten fairly good at it.
Have you ever worked on a car? A box wrench is a lousy tool for removing screws, and a hammer renders suboptimal service cleaning your battery terminals. When it comes to automotive maintenance, there are different tools for different tasks. So it is in the gun world as well.
If you are scooting out to the local Shop-n-Grab to pick up a gallon of milk and some unmentionables for your wife, then you need a pocket gun you can drop into your cargo shorts. If you want to kill a lazy Saturday afternoon transforming .22 into noise then you need a handy rimfire and a bunch of empty Coke cans. If you’re securing your hacienda against bipedal predators, then a SAINT AR-15 is your go-to iron. But what if zombies show up driving cars?
It’s not as ludicrous as it sounds. The 5.56mm is a proven social cartridge, but it doesn’t pack a great deal of downrange horsepower. If you live way out in the sticks as do I then it might be half an hour between dialing 911 and having the cavalry roar up the drive. To help me pass those 30 long minutes I want something with some reach that will reliably punch deep. That means .30-caliber power and Springfield Armory awesome. I fill that niche with a tricked-out M1A SOCOM 16.
Origins
The 7.62x51mm M14 served on the front lines for about a decade. An interim design between John Cantius Garand’s World War II masterpiece and Gene Stoner’s space age wondergun, the M14 offered a proven reliable autoloading action fed by a detachable box magazine. The inimitable ergonomics and downrange horsepower made it a true rifleman’s rifle while keeping it in military service in one capacity or another for more than half a century.
Springfield Armory offers the basic M14 platform in a bewildering array of configurations as the semi-automatic M1A. The most advanced in my opinion is the SOCOM 16 CQB. Featuring John Garand’s classic action nestled within an optimized Archangel polymer stock, the SOCOM 16 CQB makes this venerable rifle competitive with any modern iron.
My SOCOM came with a Vortex Venom red dot sight and a flared magazine well for fast reloads. The safety is still a pivoting tab in the front of the trigger guard that doesn’t care which hand you favor. The charging handle reciprocates with the bolt so you can manhandle the thing in the profoundly unlikely event of a stoppage. M-LOK slots allow copious accessorizing, while generous sling sockets enhance portage. With this as a starting point, I took my SOCOM to the next level. You know, for those zombies in cars.
Tactical Enhancements
I have a Silent Legion Multi Caliber Suppressor Kit that includes a high-efficiency .30-caliber sound suppressor and four different mounts for both 5.56mm and 7.62mm weapons. Thread mounts affix directly, while proprietary flash suppressor mounts make quick attachment and detachment a snap. The problem is that the threads on the SOCOM muzzle are a bit non-standard.
The muzzle device on the SOCOM is a stubby little ventilated thing that does a splendid job of mitigating the chaos up front. However, I wanted to mount up my quick-detach flash suppressor. That took a little searching.
You can find most anything on GunBroker. A professionally executed muzzle adapter that fits painlessly onto my gas block and sports standard 5/8×24 threads set me back $60. Mounting the thing up took maybe 10 minutes, even swapping over the luminous front sight blade. Tighten it down and the gas plug keeps everything snug. A spot of thread locker and the flash suppressor mount is there for the duration.
I added a Magpul hand stop and a Streamlight TLR-8 combination light and laser to complete the ensemble. The hand stop puts my weak hand in the same spot every time, while the TLR-8 dispels the darkness and keeps me on target day or night. Thus equipped, I am ready for any reasonable threat as well as most of the unreasonable sorts as well.
Ruminations
My tricked out SOCOM 16 sits alongside my favorite 5.56mm black rifle as well as a 9mm carbine ready to defend the household, come what may. Just like car maintenance, I grab the best tool for the task. Keeping sharp on them all takes practice, but it’s not like that’s work. If you live in the sort of place where the zombies might wear soft body armor and show up in a caravan, a nicely accessorized SOCOM 16 is just the right tool — or just a really cool gun to own. I’ll leave it to you to decide.
Now do not get me wrong from reading what I wrote above. The 28 was & is one hell of a great pistol. Especial with my Custom Shop 29 that my Old Buddy Bill Chun gave me a few years ago.
Just do not ask me to fire full load Magnum rounds with it. But if I am allowed to shoot 44 specials with it. I think that I can still do all right with it at the range!
Radek Kucharski courtesy Flickr
President Joe Biden (D) has long made his anti-gun goals clear on his path to the White House. Now, just before the midterm election on Nov. 8, the White House is saying that the president will “do everything in his power” to bring his gun-control agenda to fruition.
In a statement released late in the evening of Nov. 1, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said, “Gun violence in this country is an epidemic that will not end with thoughts and prayers alone. President Biden will continue to do everything in his power to reduce gun violence, including by calling on Congress to increase community violence intervention funding, ensure universal background checks, and send legislation to his desk banning assault weapons and high-capacity magazines.”
Let’s break this statement down.
To start, Jean-Pierre peddled the false claim that firearms ownership is somehow a sickness of sorts. The exercise of a constitutional right is hardly an illness. Charles C.W. Cooke aptly summed this up when he wrote, “Politicians who don’t believe you should have Second Amendment rights have often tried to hide their gun-control laws in arguments for ‘public health.’ The idea is to turn a matter of elementary liberty into a crisis that mandates instant action.”
Anti-Second Amendment politicians have repeatedly claimed that there is a “gun-violence epidemic,” which, according to them, necessitates curtailing the rights of law-abiding citizens. In actuality, firearms are simply tools.
Jean-Pierre then said that President Biden will “do everything in his power” to enact “universal background checks” and to ban so-called “assault weapons” and “high-capacity magazines.”
These proposed background checks on private gun loans, gifts and sales would never be “universal,” as the criminal element in our society—which is the actual problem, by the way—will not comply to mandated background checks. Only the law-abiding will. Therefore, control of lawfully armed citizens is actually what this entire legislative idea is about.
As for “assault weapons” and “high-capacity magazines,” these are also (surprise!) loaded terms invented purely for political purposes. It seems that Biden is attempting to revive a version of the 1994 Federal Assault Weapons Ban, which was found to have had a negligible effect, if any, on crime according to a congressionally mandated study.
We’ve detailed and debunked these policies numerous times, and repeatedly explained the danger of using these falsified terms. The “assault weapons” Biden seeks to ban are simply semi-automatic firearms, of which there are reportedly more than 24.4 million rifles alone in circulation. Then there is arguably the most popular self-defense handgun—the 9 mm semi-automatic—which numbers in the tens-of-millions, and which Biden has also referred to as “assault weapons” and called for banning. As for “high-capacity magazines,” Biden likes to say nobody needs 100 rounds in a magazine, but then labels magazines holding 10 or more rounds as “high capacity.” More recently, he seems to have changed his definition of “high-capacity magazine” to one that holds more than eight rounds. A 2021 estimate from the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) reports there are over 300 million of these magazines in circulation already.
Rather than address the criminal element within society, this administration once again seeks to punish the law-abiding. Though the call for gun control from the Biden administration isn’t new, the renewed effort to “do everything in his power” to pass what is clearly an unpopular and unconstitutional agenda is troubling.
Jean-Pierre, like her predecessor and president, is ill-informed about American freedom. Voters will have the chance to tell them as much on Nov. 8.