John R. Lott, Jr. - President of the Crime Prevention Research Center Joins Houston's Morning News

Episode Transcript

Speaker 2 (00:00):
John R.

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Lot is the president of the Crime Prevention Research Center,
and he says that concealed carriers do a better job
of stopping active shooters than cops do. Can you believe that?
Let's find out how and why? John Lock, good morning,
How are you sir?

Speaker 2 (00:15):
Doing great? Thanks for having me on.

Speaker 1 (00:17):
Always a pleasure chatting with you. John, for the first
time out of to today. You're gonna give us the
abreviad version here. Tell us about this, tell us about
this deep dive study you conducted.

Speaker 2 (00:27):
Great well. The FBI puts together a list of what
they call active shooting cases. These are instances where a
gun's fired in public, not part of some other type
of crime like a robbery or a game fight over
drug turf, anything from one person being shot at and missed,
all the way up to a mass public shooting. And

(00:48):
you know, we've seen a lot of cop shows on
TV which show how a permit holder supposedly behaves with
you know, something need always go wrong. They shoot the
wrong person, guns taken away from them, they get in
the way of the police, they get killed themselves. And

(01:09):
so we thought it'd be useful just to go and
see what the actual record is out there, and what
you find is that permit holders actually stop these active
shooting attacks about fifty two percent of the time compared
to about forty five percent for police And a lot

(01:30):
of the differences I think stem from the fact that
the police are in uniform and readily identifiable. So if
you're one of these attackers that's out there to try
to go and kill people, and you see a police
officer in the vicinity, you're going to wait maybe until
the police officer leaves, or you'll move to a different

(01:50):
target yourself, or if you're going to take out someone,
you're going to take out the police officer first. And
what that means is that it's it's likely the police
officer is going to be nearby, and so it takes
longer for them, on average to arrive on the scene
than it does for a concealed carry permit holder, where
the attacker doesn't know if somebody is going to be

(02:12):
around there or not until they actually start doing the attack.
It also helps explain why police officers are much more
likely to end up being killed in these situations than
a concealed carry permit holder. Of the one hundred and
fifty times that police officers stopped these attacks. Twenty seven

(02:36):
police officers were actually killed compared to only two of
the concealed carry permit holders who were killed in when
they were trying to stop these attacks, and police were
much more likely to end up being wounded. So police,
at least those in uniform, have a much more difficult job,

(03:00):
and we should thank them for the risks that they take.
But they have a much more difficult job precisely because
they're so easily identifiable.

Speaker 1 (03:09):
Yeah, no question about it. And John Arlot from the
Crime Prevention Research Center, essentially what you're saying here is
it might behoove people to go ahead and get their
concealed care licenses and just to you know, just to
make sure you know that they have an opportunity when
police are not around, if they are more successful at
stopping active shootings can protect themselves and others, that's not

(03:30):
a bad idea to avail themselves of their Second Amendment rights, right.

Speaker 2 (03:36):
I mean, there are other things that we looked at
in terms of whether bystanders are actually excidentally shot. In
the case of concealed care permit holders, there was one
case where an innocent bystander was accidentally wounded of one
hundred and eighty cases that they stopped these attacks, and

(03:59):
by contrast, police accidentally shot and killed four people. Two
of them were actually other police officers kind of friendly fire,
and two of them were civilians.

Speaker 1 (04:12):
But you know another stat here, John, if I may,
if I made John another stature that I found interesting
in your study. You know, it's an often repeated line
that if you have that gun, it almost always ends
up in the hands of somebody else. You're gonna end
up getting shot with your own gun because you're going
to lose it. You didn't find that here. Only zero
point five to six percent of the cases did somebody
have their gun taken away.

Speaker 2 (04:33):
Yeah, exactly, only one case did something like that happen.

Speaker 1 (04:38):
So it kind of just proves one of those, you know,
in the arguments that the gun control side has, you know,
saying if you have a gun for your own protection,
it's going to be used against you, against you. This
is a pretty in depth study between twenty seventeen and
twenty twenty three that proves that's not the case. Twenty fourteen,
twentyeenolog twenty twenty three.

Speaker 2 (04:57):
Right. But yeah, no, I mean, we had one case
for civilians. There are no cases of that occurring for
police officers, so police end up doing better in that
one particular measure, though obviously it was pretty insignificant in
both cases.

Speaker 1 (05:14):
Right on, it's a really really in depth look at
this whole thing. We invite people to check it out
on the website crimeresearch dot org, Right.

Speaker 2 (05:22):
John, that's right, Crime Research research dot org.

Speaker 1 (05:27):
Yeah, we want people to read that study for themselves,
but this is a really good breakdown of it. John Arlot,
President of the Crime Prevention Research Center, John, thank you
so much.

Speaker 2 (05:37):
Thank you,