The Truth About School Shootings

05/14/2019


The following information is an excerpt from Inside School Shootings: What We Have Learned.

What Have We Learned About the Shooters?

Several months after the massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, my 7-year-old son asked me if I thought something like that could happen at his school, which happens to be a private Catholic school in my home city. I assured him that nothing like that would ever happen here and that even if a bad guy did get into his school, our police department was so good and so fast that they would stop the bad guy before he hurt anyone. Of course, I was lying to him.

I feel a bit more confident in my answers when I assure my son that terrorists will never again take over airplanes and fly them into buildings. But for that answer, I have a bit more to fall back on, considering the response the nation took after 9/11 compared to its response after Newtown. After 9/11, the U.S. met the threat by installing sophisticated body scanners at airports, hardening cockpit doors with impenetrable steel, creating an Armed Pilot program and expanding the armed Air Marshal program. The terrorists of 9/11 were fairly confident that if they couldn’t bluff their way into the cockpit, they’d be able to breach the door, where they’d find a defenseless crew tucked into their very own “gun-free zone.”

Today, Al-Qaeda and ISIS know that even if a cockpit door could be breached (however unlikely), the terrorist’s last memory might well be a muzzle flash as an armed pilot shoots him in the face. A 9/11 response was needed after Newtown, but today, most of our schools remain as unprotected as they were the day before the Newtown tragedy — demonstrated in February 2018 as 17 students and faculty members were gunned down at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Proposed solutions range from banning AR-15s and limiting magazine capacity to no more than 10 rounds to creating an armed teacher program and eliminating “gun-free zones.” Following, I’ll be looking at each of those proposed solutions in great detail, and I’ll also look at whether victim response has affected the outcome of any shooting (positively or negatively). I’ll summarize this article with a four-point plan designed to eliminate the scourge of these murderers once and for all.

To start, let’s take a look at the magazine-capacity argument.

Is Magazine Capacity the Real Killer?

It seems that even before the blood of mass shootings dries, the anti-gun movement renews its rallying cry that the reason these monsters are able to murder so many victims in a short period of time is because of the rate of fire enabled by magazine capacities larger than five or 10 rounds. And let’s not forget the dreaded semi-automatic firearms. So that begs the question: Exactly how many rounds can be fired per minute when using magazine capacities of five rounds, 10 rounds or 30 rounds? Would a smaller magazine size have affected the outcome at any mass shooting?

To answer that first question, let’s look at the theoretical maximum rate of fire attainable with three different-sized magazines. The table below shows how many rounds can be fired per minute using a moderate rate of fire of two rounds per second and a moderate magazine change rate of three seconds. I’ll add that someone with practice would be able to fire at about twice this rate.


The table above shows how many rounds can be fired per minute with a moderate rate of fire of two rounds per second and moderate reload rate of three seconds per magazine change. An experienced shooter would be able to fire at approximately twice this rate.


As you can see, reducing a magazine capacity by two-thirds doesn’t reduce the rate of fire by two-thirds. It simply means that more magazine changes are required per minute. The actual reduction in rate of fire when going from a 30-round magazine to a 10-round magazine is about 25 percent.

Having those baseline numbers, the “it’s the magazine” crowd would have a strong argument if it could be demonstrated that mass shooters were firing at a rate of fire of 100 rounds per minute or more. Unfortunately for them, the facts don’t support that argument. The next table shows the actual rate of fire in the five most notorious school shootings, including the most recent school shooting in Parkland, Florida.


The table above compares the duration, average rate of fire and lethality of several school shooting incidents.


In every single case, the shooters were using a rate of fire far below the theoretical limit of even five-round magazines. That same rate of fire is reflected in other mass shootings outside of schools, including those in San Bernardino, Fort Hood, Aurora and Charleston. In fact, only one single mass shooter in history has even approached the theoretical limit of 30-round magazines.

In October 2017, a mass-shooter fired 1,100 rounds in 10 minutes from an elevated position overlooking the Las Vegas strip with the aid of a bump stock, designed to mimic the speed of automatic fire. Due to the use of that device and the fact that he was firing from an elevated position at a crowd of more than 13,000 people, this shooting tends to fit into its own category. In fact, it might remain a category of one. The Trump administration directed the Justice Department to ban bump stocks and other devices that allow semi-automatic firearms to mimic automatic fire. The federal ban took effect on March 26, 2019.

What We’ve Learned

Let’s state these facts with a little perspective. The Newtown shooter fired at a rate of no faster than a 150-year-old lever-action Henry rifle, popular among Union soldiers during the Civil War, even though he had ten 30-round magazines and an AR-15. The Fort Hood shooter was a third slower than that, while the Virginia Tech shooter and the Parkland shooter were 50 percent slower. Even the San Bernardino shooters, who carried AR-15s and 30-round magazines, fired at a rate no faster than one round every 3.3 seconds, which is 40 percent slower than the lever-action Henry. The Aurora theater shooter fired at a rate no faster than a 170-year-old, single-shot Sharps rifle, developed 13 years before the Civil War began, even though he had a 100-round magazine. Keep in mind, the Sharps rifle has a capacity of one round, or 99 rounds fewer than the shooter had in his magazine. The Columbine shooters fired at a rate no faster than the 240-year-old muzzle-loading flintlock Kentucky rifle favored by the American patriots in the Revolutionary War, while the Umpqua Community College shooter was even slower than that.