People have been acting for a long time like the United States is the world's hotbed of mass public shootings. After a 2015 mass shooting during his administration, President Barack Obama said: "The one thing we do know is that we have a pattern now of mass shootings in this country that has no parallel anywhere else in the world."
This belief is constantly used to push for more gun control. If we can only get rid of guns in the United States, we will get rid of these mass public shootings and be more like the rest of the world, gun-control supporters preach.
But America doesn't lead the world in mass public shootings. We're not even close. Just last month, a school shooting in Crimea, Russia, killed 20 people and wounded 65 others. But Americans usually don't hear about such events.
The Crime Prevention Research Center, of which I am president, recently finished updating a list of mass public shootings worldwide. These shootings must kill four or more people in a public place. Following the FBI definition, the shootings we list are carried out simply with the intention of killing. We exclude gang fights because they tend to be motivated by battles for drug turf. Killings that arise from other crimes are also excluded.
Then there are politically motivated attacks, either by or against governments. Some shootings occur in the course of guerrilla wars for sovereignty. These attacks do not meet our definition. This meant excluding a lot of very deadly shootings such as those in the Russian-Chechen conflict.
Over the course of 18 years, from 1998 to 2015, our list contains 2,354 attacks and at least 4,880 shooters outside the United States and 53 attacks and 57 shooters in this country.
Most gunmen are smart enough to know that they can kill more people if they attack places where victims can't defend themselves. That's one reason why 98 percent of mass public shootings since 1950 have occurred in places where citizens are banned from having guns.
The national media tend to ignore case after case of mass public shootings being stopped by armed private citizens. Just a couple of days before the synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh, a concealed handgun permit holder stopped an alleged killer who was shooting black folks at a grocery store in Louisville, Ky.
It is understandable that the media don't cover most mass public shootings in other countries. But as much as it might not fit the media's narrative, the U.S. is a relatively safe place from these shooting attacks. Still, we need to let people protect themselves and each other. We need to get rid of gun-free zones.
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John R. Lott Jr. is president of the Crime Prevention Research Center .
Editorial on 11/24/2018