Many graphs using the data are shown at the end of the post. Each time a public shooting draws national attention, particularly at places such as schools or churches, politicians and the media often respond by citing figures that claim the United States suffers...
Dr. John Lott has a new op-ed at The Federalist. . Democrats in the United States repeatedly praise Australia’s 1996 gun confiscation law as a successful model to emulate, while many Australians — especially after the Bondi Beach terror attack earlier this week —...
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...
News reports indicate that so far four people have been identified as killed, though one of those was the attacker. This clearly appears to be yet another mass shooting in a place where civilians were banned from having guns. Michigan state law bans people carrying...
Entertainment television repeatedly distorts the reality of mass public shootings—both who commits them and how they occur. Show after show depicts shooters wielding machine guns, even though that never happens. Another falsehood it pushes is the idea that white...
According to court opinions, competency rulings, law-enforcement releases, or mainstream reporting that cites those records, seven U.S. mass public shooters since 1998 had a documented diagnosis of schizophrenia -- 0.26 cases per year. There was one other case where...
Our recent discussion on this issue in the WSJ is available here.
Updated August 27, 2025: You would think the empirical evidence would be overwhelming at some point. When the Aurora, Colorado Batman movie theater shooter attacked, seven movie theaters were showing "The Dark Knight Rises" on July 20th within 20 minutes of the...
It turns out that it wasn't an accident that attack in Minneapolis occurred at a gun-free zone. The murderer's manifesto makes it clear that he purposely picked a gun-free zone. The murderer wrote his manifesto in Russian, but here is the relevant translation. "I...
Dr. John Lott has a new op-ed at Real Clear Politics. It was also published at New York Sun, The Blaze, Zero Hedge, World Net Daily, AOL, Nemos News Network, The Highland County Press (Ohio), and The Ohio Press Network. . Over the last few days, Americans have...
The Austrian city of Graz is in mourning after a suspected gunman killed 10 people in a secondary school shooting this morning. Seven women and three men are so far counted among the dead, local officials have said. The 21-year-old suspect - a former pupil that...
For those who wonder about President Trump's commitments to the right to self defense, you can listen to his comments immediately after the Florida State University shooting. Here is our recent research on active shootings being stopped by concealed handgun permit...