THE 10 MOST EXPLOSIVE GUN CONTROL FACTS: How to Save Lives

• What is the common feature of these shocking, mass attacks? They take place where guns are banned.

• Take the Aurora, Colorado movie theater example: there were seven movie theaters showing the movie Batman within a 20-minute drive of where the killer lived.

He didn't go to the movie theater closest to his home. He didn't go to the movie theater with the largest audience. He went to the one movie theater -- the only one -- that posted a sign that banned concealed handguns from the theater.

• Look at gun bans more generally: Now if you look at bans generally, you can't point to a place, Chicago and Washington, D.C., where we ban guns with positive results. Instead, murder rates and violent crimes went up afterwards. In the U.K. and Jamaica, Ireland, island nations that have banned guns -- you can't find a place where murder rates have actually gone down. They have gone up usually by large amounts.

• Let's look at gun-free zones hypothetically on a personal level: Let's say someone was stalking you. That person was threatening violence against you and your family. Would you feel safer putting a sign in front of your home that read, "This home is a gun-free zone"?

Would that deter someone intent on violence -- or encourage one? In fact, nobody would put a sign like that in front of their home. Yet some businesses and offices think posting such a sign, at movie theaters and malls will help -- when common sense would tell us that it does not.

• Rather than repelling criminals, gun bans actually encourage violence. Gun-free zones instruct the malevolent criminal where victims can't defend themselves.

• The reason these mass attacks occur is because the killer wants to commit suicide. If you read the notes they leave or their diaries, if you watch their videos, you'll find that -- time after time -- they want to kill themselves in a way that will make people notice them. In their sick minds, they want to go out in a blaze of violence that will have people pay attention to them.

In these mass attacks, 75 percent of the time the killers die at the scene; the other 25 percent they planned on dying, but they couldn't bring themselves to finish the act of suicide.

• These people want to get media attention. They know that the more people they kill, the more media attention they'll get. So they target the places where they can kill as many people as possible. And they're planning these things months and months in advance.

• Should schools have armed guards? We should learn something from Israel. They've had a terrorist problem since the forties. For years they tried to do just that - have more police, more military, more armed security guards and they discovered they simply didn't have enough money. Terrorists have huge strategic advantages to patiently find weak points.

In the early seventies, Israel finally realized they couldn't flood areas with enough military or police. They instead began permitting citizens to carry concealed weapons. About 15 percent of citizens are so licensed.

At the time of the Virginia Tech shooting, something similar was attempted. Before the shooting, you had about one police officer for every 80 acres of campus. After the attack, it was one officer for every 40 acres. It doesn't scale.

You see this in the methodical way these killers choose locations now. They find places where people cannot defend themselves.

• Do gun bans work? The natural reaction is to say, "If I can just get rid of the gun, I can stop bad things from happening." You don't think about all of the unintended consequences of that:

What about all of the successful defensive uses of guns?

More importantly, can you prevent evil individuals from getting guns? You can't find a country around the world that ever imposed a gun ban where murder rates actually fell after the ban.

Even island nations -- you would think these would be the ideal experiment -- with gun bans are unable to prevent criminal gangs from bringing in guns, drugs, and other contraband.

It's the good, law-abiding citizens that are impacted by gun bans, not criminals. To the extent that you disarm law-abiding citizens and not the violent, you find the perverse result that things get worse. This occurred in Washington, DC and Chicago. After their gun bans, violent crime and murder rates spiked.

The question you have to ask yourself about gun laws: who are you most likely to disarm: the law-abiding citizen or the criminal?

The gun-free zone provides a clear field for evil to carry out mass murder. It creates sitting ducks for violence. Those who push gun control may mean well (or not), but they haven't thought through what they want to do.

If gun-control zealots could point to even a few countries where gun bans lowered murder rates, they might have a legitimate argument. But they can't, because they don't exist.

• Europe has about the same rate of public shootings per capita as the U.S., yet it has far more draconian gun regulations. Germany, which has two of the worst four school shootings, has a year-long waiting period with two psychological screens. When you have people who take months to plan attacks, and are willing to die to pull the attacks off, will not be deterred.

If you want to stop these attacks, you can take two actions:

(1) The media can stop giving publicity to these killers. The media shouldn't name the killers. This would reduce to a large extent the motivation for the attacks.

(2) We must reduce and eliminate "gun-free zones". Since at least 1950, with but one exception, all public shootings with three or more victims have all taken place in venues where guns were banned. The theater shooting, the Sikh Temple shooting, the school shootings, you go down the list and in each case, the gun-free zone is the place the killers always choose.


Via Professor John Lott, the world's foremost expert on the impact of gun control laws on society. Paraphrased from an interview on The Mark Levin Show (MP3).