The FBI says it has identified a characteristic common to sites of active shooter shootings.
…open spaces—which include roads, neighborhoods, parks, and outdoor venues—are the places where victims are most likely to be targeted.
There’s one other characteristic, not fully addressed in the FBI’s report, that’s well worth consideration. How many of those locations were defenseless, whether because laws barred firearms from the areas or because the relevant business owner—mall owner or theater owner, for instance—lawfully posted his locale as barring firearms? The report did address this, but only tangentially, with this single remark, captioning a single chart:
Of the 48 incidents in 2023, four involved civilian intervention where a civilian intervened or attempted to intervene, resulting in two civilian casualties.
Across all 48 of the 2023 active shooter events, there were 105 killed, and 139 injured. Subtract off the two casualties where civilians responded in the time frame before the cops could arrive—naively allocating the two to one death and one injury—and that works out to an average of 2-3 deaths per defenseless event and 3-4 injuries per defenseless event.
Clearly armed patrons already on scene reduced the casualty rate by filling the gap between the onset of the event and the arrival of the second first responders. But the wannabe gun controllers would rather sacrifice the Left’s “if it saves one life” mantra in favor of their obsession with disarming all of us.
The FBI’s report can be read here.
The report also ignores the vastly more numerous DGUs – Defensive Gun Uses. Those include deploying or even displaying the presence of a gun by an armed citizen. Dana Loesch has cited numbers indicating a 5:1 or higher ratio of DGUs to mass shootings, though I’m not sure of her source. She has noted, too, that many uses are unreported, since the perpetrator of violence sees a carrier and goes elsewhere.
As noted by others, mass shooters (Colorado theater, Nashville school) select their target location based at least in part on the absence of security — aka, opposition.
The wolves prefer an unguarded flock to one with sheepdogs present.