Trib Live
We need to trust soldiers to carry weapons on bases. That would provide another line of defense against any attacks and not leave our soldiers as sitting ducks.
That's how John Lott concluded his op-ed. As usual, when lamenting the practice of gun-free zones and blaming them for mass shootings, John is conveniently overlooking a few things.
When Jared Loughner did his thing in Tuscon a few years ago, his venue was not a gun free zone. Being Arizona which enjoys Constitutional Carry, there were armed citizens all over the place but not one of them was able to intervene in time. In addition, several of the other highly publicized mass shootings took place where armed guards were on the scene. So, the presence of armed good guys has proven to be an ineffective response to mass shootings.
Another rather humorous and ironical aspect of his argument is that many times gun-rights folks, and probably John himself, insist that mass shootings are extremely rare. Now all of a sudden, we need to arm soldiers on bases and eliminate gun free zones to combat them.
The biggest problem with his proposal is that most of the mass shooters are lawful gun owners. It stands to reason that if lawful gun owners are committing mass shootings every once in a while, if we arm more of them, there will be more shootings.
