Australia already has highly restrictive gun laws compared to the US. Yet, many places in the US are like Australia. University campuses and many shopping malls, for example, ban guns.
Where the US differs from Australia is that some of those ‘gun-free zones’ are near places where members of the public (civilians) are legally permitted to carry guns. That turns out to make important differences to how shooting attacks like the one at Bondi turn out.
Research by one of us (Crime Prevention Research Center’s John Lott) found that shooters kill fewer people when an armed civilian intervenes than when they don’t.
Of the 562 public shooter attacks in the US from 2014-24, armed civilians ended 199 or 35 per cent of incidents. The proportion was higher, at 53 per cent, in places where civilians were free to carry a concealed handgun. Police, on the other hand, ended 30 per cent.
Armed civilians have been safe, as well as effective, in stopping shooters.
At only one of the 199 situations where civilians intervened were bystanders accidentally shot. They did not obstruct police in any way. Armed civilians who intervened were killed in two cases (one per cent) and wounded in 49 (25 per cent). Remarkably, in 58 of the incidents (32 per cent) they prevented potential mass shootings.
In case you are thinking that no mistakes are acceptable, consider that uniformed police, despite their training, faced greater risks and made more mistakes in the 167 incidents they stopped. They accidentally shot bystanders or fellow officers five times (three per cent) – over five times the civilian rate – and 19 officers were killed (11 per cent of incidents) or eleven times the civilian rate, and 51 (31 per cent) were wounded.
Challenging another myth, neither civilians nor police officers had their firearms taken by the attacker in any of the attacks.
Mass public shootings are almost always in gun-free zones. Australia is one big ‘gun-free zone’ because of the tight gun laws and regulations. Only some populous places in the US are ‘gun-free zones’ and they are where bad people tend go when they want to kill others. They know that law-abiding citizens won’t be able to shoot back at them.
As the Bondi Hanukkah on the Beach massacre sadly demonstrated, the police can’t be everywhere instantly. Without the freedom of armed self-defence, the evidence shows that death rates are higher than they would otherwise be.
Consider also that the shooters were reported to allegedly have IEDs in a vehicle. Criminals and terrorists get hold of firearms no matter what the laws. If increased firearms restrictions somehow managed to stop the Bondi perpetrators from getting guns, we know that they had a potentially more deadly and harder to stop back up plan.
Bans benefit baddies.
The research report is available here.
