Kerby Anderson

Whenever there is a mass shooting we read headlines or hear commentators describe it as a random shooting. While it is true that many times the victims are chosen at random, the locations for their carnage are rarely random.

When Dr. John Lott was on my radio program I asked him about this. I had heard that the shooter at the Aurora, Colorado movie theater bypassed many other theaters and venues because those locations had security.

John Lott said the diary of the killer (James Holmes) explained his selection. He decided not to attack the Denver airport because he wrote that it had “substantial security.” Then out of seven theaters within 20 minutes of the shooter’s apartments, Holmes went to the only theater that banned concealed handguns.

John Lott gave another example from the church shooting in Charleston, South Carolina. The shooter (Dylann Roof) originally planned to go to the College of Charleston. But he changed his plans after realizing the school had armed guards. While drinking at someone’s house, Roof blurted out his plan to carry out a mass shooting at the College of Charleston. The person who heard the comment said: “I don’t think the church was his primary target because he told us he was going for the school.” The person at the party concluded that because Roof couldn’t get into the school, he settled for the church.

If gun-free zones seem to make people more vulnerable to shooters, is there anything that might reduce the likelihood of a mass shooting? John Lott and Bill Landes in a scholarly research paper gathered more than twenty years of data on mass public shootings. They studied the impact of gun-control laws. None of these laws had an impact on shootings except one. They concluded that “the only law that had a statistically significant impact on mass public shootings was the passage of right-to-carry laws.”

Our elected officials need to consider these facts if they really want to keep people in their communities safe.