42% of active crime is prevented, forestalled or stopped by armed citizens. Or not.

This is interesting and a useful sounding board of data versus the usual pablum of emotive advocacy. From Active Shooter Incidents in the United States in 2016 and 2017 from the FBI.

The FBI has designated 50 shootings in 2016 and 2017 as active shooter incidents. Twenty incidents occurred in 2016, while 30 incidents occurred in 2017.

As with past FBI active shooter-related publications, this report does not encompass all gun-related situations. Rather, it focuses on a specific type of shooting situation. The FBI defines an active shooter as one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area. Implicit in this definition is the shooter's use of one or more firearms. The active aspect of the definition inherently implies that both law enforcement personnel and citizens have the potential to affect the outcome of the event based upon their responses to the situation.

This report supplements two previous publications: A Study of Active Shooter Incidents in the United States Between 2000 and 2013 and Active Shooter Incidents in the United States in 2014 and 2015. The methodology articulated in the 2000-2013 study was applied to the 2016 and 2017 incidents to ensure consistency. Excluded from this report are gang- and drug-related shootings and gun-related incidents that appeared not to have put other people in peril (e.g., the accidental discharge of a firearm in a bar). Analysts relied on official law enforcement investigative reports (when available), FBI holdings, and publicly available resources when gathering data for this report.

Though limited in scope, this report was undertaken to provide clarity and data of value to federal, state, tribal, and campus law enforcement as well as other first responders, corporations, educators, and the general public as they seek to neutralize threats posed by active shooters and save lives during such incidents.

Every shooting tragedy is followed by a storm of talking points. On the left is the callous effort to shanghai the tragedy to advance a gun control agenda even though, almost uniformly, the proposed gun control measures would not have prevented the tragedy and on the right there is the knee-jerk defensiveness about the Second Amendment. No one seeks to understand root causes and real solutions. Everyone defaults to their tribal arguing points, shouting across one another.

One of our challenges in trying to understand what is going on is that we are in a blessedly peaceful time with violent crime reaching historical lows. As a consequence, the number of active shooter incidents is low and therefore there is little statistical rigor to be extracted because the population of incidents is so small.

In this report, there are only 50 incidents in two years in a country of some 320 million people which meet the criteria of an active shooter incident. Would that there were even fewer. But fifty is such a low number, you can no longer count on statistics to tell you very much in terms of their attributes. Even within the population of shooting incidents, it is small. Annually there are some 20,000 gun suicides, and, depending on definitions, 10-15,000 gun murders. The definitions most frequently used yield a number of around 12,000 per year. 221 of these 12,000 deaths were due to the 50 active shooter category.

So if we can't do a statistical analysis, we have to default to a much cruder approach of simply eye-balling for patterns of characteristics. It has low rigor but might be interesting. I spent about a minute on each shooter, searching the news accounts. In a small handful, there was almost no information available in a routine search. In others, there was a lot. In some, such as the Las Vegas shooting, there is a lot of coverage and almost no information. We still do not know why it happened. A quick review can gloss over or miss whether someone was drunk or sober, hispanic or white, mentally ill or simply angry, foreign born illegal, foreign born legal resident, foreign born naturalized, etc.

So take everything below with a grain of salt. It is a fast scan.

The FBI numbers yield a number of insights.

26% of the active shooter incidents end with the perpetrator committing suicide.

22% of shooters were killed by police.

Active shooter incidents mirror very roughly the racial distribution of general violence. 47% of active hooters are white, 37% are African American, 9% are Asian American, 7% are Hispanic.

While the distribution by age follows that of violent crime (highest in the twenties and steadily declining from there and rare over fifty), whites seem to have a bi-modal distribution with spikes among teens and then an overrepresentation among the fifties.

35% of active shooters are foreign-born, even if naturalized. 4 from Asia, 4 from the Middle East, 3 from Africa, 3 from Central America, 1 from India.

7% are Muslim, though only one of the three active shooters appears to have had an explicitly Islamic motivation.

7% had some sort of possibly related military service, i.e. trauma from service might have been an underlying causal factor.

What was especially striking to me was the ultimate disposition. 26% of the shooters killed themselves. 22% were killed by the police. 16% were killed or captured by citizens (armed or otherwise.) 36% surrendered to the police when confronted by them.

So of those who were forcibly stopped from their shooting spree, 42% were stopped by citizens and 58% were stopped by the police.

Tiny population of incidents, weak rigor. You can't make to much of this.

But it is interesting because there is a larger debate about policing and an armed populace that is going on. on the right, among the positions taken, is that citizens have a right to self-protection and that the Second Amendment ensures that right. The adage is, "When seconds count, the police are only minutes away." But how much merit is there to that argument.

In some places, certainly. In my city, the city government has long shrunk the policing budget and road maintenance in order to fund white elephant glamor projects and fund political corruption. If you live in a low crime part of the city, you rarely see the police and even if there is a violent crime occurring, it can take upwards of ten or twenty minutes for the police to show up. Consequently, even though my neighborhood is overwhelmingly registered as Democrats, there is also an astonishing number of weapons in homes.

So you can see circumstances where the right argument does manifest. But to what degree? Just how many crimes are stopped through gun ownership? It is a conceptually very difficult question to resolve. We have some parts of the country with dense gun ownership and low crime and we have some parts with low gun ownership and high gun control and very high crime. The causal mechanisms are obscure.

The FBI tracked numbers are also all over the place, in some studies indicating that armed citizens rarely prevent crimes and in others indicating that perhaps 50% of crimes are forestalled or prevent through gun ownership.

Basically, we don't know. The incentives to skew the studies is huge, the confirmation bias overwhelming. It is hard to get dispassionate data. The Active Shooter data does not resolve anything because the population size is too small to derive robust conclusions. But it does suggest that armed and proactive citizens are a surprisingly large component of crime resolution.