Australia Mass Public Shooting: 15 murdered, 40 wounded. Did it take 13 minutes for Police to Arrive on the Crime Scene in Australia? One survivor says that even then the police didn’t immediately act. Australia and Brown University are both gun-free zones.

Yesterday we saw mass shootings in Australia where 15 were murdered and at Brown University where two were murdered. Both occurred in places with strict gun control (the rules for Brown are available here).

The problem is that uniformed law enforcement have an extremely difficult time stopping these attacks. If a shooter sees an officer in uniform, they can wait for the officer to leave before they attack or move to another target. If they do attack there, the first person they will shoot is the officer. The problem is that gun-free zones are a magnet for mass public shootings. In the US, Civilians with concealed handguns stop these attacks more frequently, and they stop them more successfully in places they are allowed to carry.

Mass murderers consistently avoid those places where people are allowed to have permitted concealed handguns. Civilians with permitted concealed handguns are extremely law-abiding, and they are more effective at stopping these types of attacks.

Note the worst mass public shooting in Western Europe and the US was in Paris in late 2015, where Islamic terrorists murdered 130 people at a concert.

Mass public shootings are defined as four or more people murdered in a public place, not part of some other crime such as a gang fight over drug turf. From 1998 to 2024, there have been 104 mass public shootings, with the average number of people murdered in an attack equal to 8.4. There are eight cases where as many as 15 or more people have killed in an attack. On average there were 11.2 people wounded in an attack. One should note that the population of the US is 12.4 times larger than Australia.

In addition, the US ranks 66th among the 101 countries studied in terms of the per capita rate of attacks over the twenty years from 1998 to 2017.

We have previously written about the failure of Australia’s gun control laws here and provided testimony to the Australia federal senate here (and Dr. Lott’s testimony made it into the Senate Committee’s final report available here).

Brown University not only banned guns, but Rhode Island has among the STRICTEST gun control in the United States (AWB, Large capacity mag ban, Red Flag, etc), with it getting an “A-” from the Gifford gun control organization. The states that surround Rhode Island (Connecticut and Massachusetts) have “A” ratings for their gun control regulations.