I'm still magpie-like gathering sources in anticipation of Larry Correia's first non-fiction book on why Americans should continue to shoot each other. One of the topics likely to be there is the idea that gun owners are useful in the event of mass shootings. Claims around this are vague and hard to substantiate statistically partly because there is a counterfactual element to them. Cases where a civilian shoots (or shoots at) an attacker may have reduced the number of people killed but that assumes the killer continues shooting until the police turn up.
Texas State University has a centre that focuses on training police on active shooter situations which describes itself thusly:
"The ALERRT Center at Texas State University was created in 2002 as a partnership between Texas State University, the San Marcos, Texas Police Department and the Hays County, Texas Sheriff's Office to address the need for active shooter response training for first responders. In 2013, ALERRT at Texas State was named the National Standard in Active Shooter Response Training by the FBI."
https://alerrt.org/about
I can't say whether that training is any good or not one way or another but as part of that work they collect data on how different events come to an end. They define what that means:
"We consider an event to be resolved when the attacker stopped actively trying to kill people. We split the resolution of the event into two broad time frames. These were whether the event was resolved before the police arrived on scene or after."
https://www.activeattackdata.org/allattacks.html
The "resolutions" are mapped out in a flowchart-style diagram:
Civilians shoot the attacker in about 5% of cases, whereas they subdue the attack in about 10% of cases. Note, the non-shooting outcome might still involve firearms. However, of those cases which end before the police end, over 70% are ended by the attacker themselves by either killing themselves or just leaving.
There's no broader moral here other than I thought the diagram was interesting and a neat way of showing the data.
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