Real Facts About School & Other Mass Shooting Defense Tactics

What if I told you that all of the mass and school shootings over the past 20 years or so could have been done, to equal effect, by a murderer using a 150-year old lever action rifle?

You know, the same kind that was commonly used in the Civil War?

Or, what if I told you that the majority of mass shootings could have been done, again to the same effect, with a 170-year old single-shot Sharps-type rifle? That rifle was invented 13 years before the Civil War began.

In the collective rush to “fix” the problem of these types of unspeakable crimes, we tend to get collectively stupid by grasping at straws in a desperate race for a solution. You know exactly what I am talking about. When something bad happens, there’s an immediate call to ban something. So-called “high-capacity” magazines are almost always blamed for tragic results of mass shootings. The thinking goes that if you reduce magazine capacity, then vicious and heartless murderers wouldn’t be able to hurt and kill as many people. You’ve probably heard all the quotes in the news like this one:

“If only we didn’t have these high-capacity magazines on the market, the shooter would never have been able to inflict that level of harm…”

To the uninformed and intellectually lazy, these types of statements sound perfectly rational. When challenged with the fallacy of their logic, you might hear those same folks shift gears and offer up statements like, “Well, of course, it won’t completely prevent another mass murder, but it will probably help.” I get it. It’s hard to admit the existence of true evil and even harder to try to solve the root problems that cause humans to do unspeakable things. As a result, we cry for quick and easy solutions that feel good.

I recently sat in what was perhaps the most enlightening presentation I’ve seen in decades. At the recent United States Concealed Carry Association Expo, Chief USCCA Instructor Michael Martin presented a veritable mountain of data that he had painstakingly compiled about mass shootings. Deciding to look at actual facts as a basis for formulating meaningful, realistic, and effective response strategies, he evaluated what actually happened during mass shooting events. Were magazines a factor? What about police response time? Did it make a difference when unarmed people fought back against the killer? How about security, like simple door locks? Did simple and inexpensive deterrents like that make any difference?

The results of Martin’s data compilation are nothing short of stunning. I don’t have the space to go through all of the angles here, so I’ll stick with the magazine capacity angle as an example of the study. Since the perception of the uninformed is that magazine capacity allows an increased rate of fire, and therefore more killing in less time, Martin took a close look at that factor in dozens of shootings. Here are the actual rates of fire based on the number of minutes the murderer had compared to the number of shots fired. I’m naming the locations only as I refuse to print the names of the despicable slime that perpetrate these heinous crimes.

All numbers reflect rounds per minute fired.

• Virginia Tech: 15
• Newtown: 15 – 31
• Columbine: 4
• Red Lake: 5
• Oikos University: 6
• Northern Illinois University: 8
• San Bernardino: 7 – 14
• Fort Hood: 21
• Binghampton: 25
• Aurora: 8 – 14

Read the Remainder at Ammo-Land