Facts About the Connecticut Shooting, and The Gun-free Zone

 1. "Adam Lanza reportedly obtained the guns for his massacre illegally, stealing them from his mother after murdering her"

2. "There is no law currently proposed by Democrats in Congress that would have prevented Lanza from doing what he did. None."

3. "Connecticut has some of the most restrictive gun ownership laws in the country, yet this massacre happened there."

4. "Lanza didn't use an automatic weapon. He used two pistols and a semi-automatic rifle, which fires only one bullet for each time the trigger is pressed"

5. "If guns were made illegal, every law abiding citizen would turn in his guns"

6. "Besides police, who then would be left packing heat? It would be all those countless people who feel no need to obey the law. These lawbreakers would now also know that any crime they wanted to commit against other people could be done without fear of anyone shooting back"

7. Nearly every major U.S. shooting in the past couple decades was in a gun-free zone.

"John Lott Jr., a former economist at Yale University Law School and noted gun rights activist...has tracked the matter.

In 2000, he published a report along with William M. Landes of the University of Chicago Law School, which analyzed mass killings from 1977-99. The study, “Multiple Victim Public Shootings,” determined that each incident in that period took place in a “gun-free zone.”

"In the years since, Lott has continued to track mass shooting events and local gun laws. He has published many on his blog, as well as in commentaries for Fox News, among other media outlets. And he has used his findings to update his books, “More Guns, Less Crime” and “The Bias Against Guns.”

Once again, Lott’s findings show that each mass shooting, except the Giffords incident, took place in “gun-free zones.”

“Killers go where victims can’t defend themselves,” Lott wrote last week in an email to The Telegraph, using this year’s Aurora movie theater shooting as an example. “Out of seven theaters showing the Batman movie premiere within 20 minutes of the suspect’s apartment, only one banned permitted concealed handguns. The suspect didn’t go to the closest nor the largest, but to the one that banned self-defense. Time after time, the story is the same.”

On the whole, Lott’s colleagues – both in the media and academia – don’t dispute his findings.

“I suspect that most places that mass public shootings could logically occur are ‘gun-free zones’ either determined by the government (schools) or by private businesses and institutions,” David Hemenway, director of the Injury Control Research Center at Harvard University, wrote in an email."

http://www.nashuatelegraph.com/news/statenewengland/990499-469/examining-the-last-20-years-of-mass.html