On October 26, 2015, The Washington Post published an article by Christopher Ingraham that stated concealed carry permit holders have committed at least 29 mass shooting since 2007. The article does mention that in at least 8 cases, armed civilians did prevent mass shootings since 2007 and there could be more undocumented cases.
But that’s where some of the facts seem to get skewed. They posted the following graphic that shows dates the mass shootings happened along with the names of the shooters.
That same day, Bearing Arms writers Bob Owens posted his own article debunking some of the statistics that Christopher Ingraham had used in his article. He breaks down each of the 29 incidents with explanations on each one.
To summarize, here are the stats based on the research Bob has done:
- Only 6 of the 29 mass murders were carried out by concealed carry permit holders using concealed firearms
- 7 of the 29 mass murders were technically not mass shootings as they reported some instances where only 3 or less people were shot. Not to say these shootings were not a tragic incidents but if we are reporting facts then it should be based on facts. The FBI definition of a mass shooting is 4 or more:
Generally, mass murder was described as a number of murders (four or more) occurring during the same incident, with no distinctive time period between the murders. These events typically involved a single location, where the killer murdered a number of victims in an ongoing incident (e.g. the 1984 San Ysidro McDonalds incident in San Diego, California; the 1991 Luby’s Restaurant massacre in Killeen, Texas; and the 2007 Virginia Tech murders in Blacksburg, Virginia).
- 4-8 of the mass shooters that were said to have concealed carry permits did not have concealed carry permits.
It should be noticed that the statistics the Washington Article was based on came from the Violence Policy Center. With a quick Google Search you can find many articles discussing how accurate their reports are.
