When the Founding Fathers included the Second Amendment in the Constitution, their purpose was to secure a fundamental, God-given right. They explicitly stated that the government had no authority to take it away: “The right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

This month, we’ll mark the 250th anniversary of “the shot heard ‘round the world” at Lexington and Concord on April 19, 1775. The colonists took up arms against the British because the British came to confiscate their arms. The Founders recognized that no people is free without the ability to defend themselves — primarily against tyrannical government.

It’s also true that people are endowed by their Creator with the right of self-defense against criminal assault. It’s not exactly surprising that people with concealed carry permits or who carry firearms in constitutional carry states are more successful at self-defense than unarmed citizens. More on that in a minute.

According to a recent study from the University of Colorado Boulder, “1 in 15 US adults have been on the scene of a mass shooting.” The study defined a “mass shooting” as “a gun-related crime where four or more people were shot in a public space.” (That’s not necessarily deaths.) And “physically present” was defined as “in the immediate vicinity of where the shooting occurred at the time it occurred, such that bullets were fired in your direction, you could see the shooter, or you could hear the gunfire.”

The study was conducted to commemorate the four-year anniversary of the King Soopers shooting that killed 10 people in Boulder. While the authors made no recommendation as far as gun control, it also seems as though their goal was to make sure their number of “adults on the scene” was as big as possible. Way too big, if you do a little math and wonder how in the world 17 million Americans could’ve been on the scene for one of these.

Senior author David Pyrooz, a criminologist and professor of sociology at the Institute for Behavioral Science at CU Boulder, did note one fascinating detail: More than a third of these mass shootings occurred in neighborhoods, not public venues. “These are primarily shootings that occur between gangs or crews … in parking lots, yards, porches or other residential locations,” said Pyrooz. “It’s the type of mass shooting that completely escapes media attention.”

We’ve noted that lack of attention before. Why is that? Because, as the UC report says just before quoting Pyrooz, “Black people and males were more likely to have witnessed a mass shooting.” The race component is critical, but most media reports and researchers ignore or downplay it because it’s not PC to talk about the culture of violence among blacks.

That all brings me back to concealed carry. Our Thomas Gallatin recently exposed the agenda of the left-wing Violence Policy Center in its bogus effort to pin a lot of murders on concealed carry permit holders. The flip side is how successful concealed carriers are in stopping crime.

According to John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, “Civilians stop more active shooters than police and do so with fewer mistakes.” He’s not disparaging police to say that — far from it.

Lott’s purpose is to show that people who lawfully carry firearms are a tremendous benefit to public safety. He writes, “In non-gun-free zones, where civilians are legally able to carry guns, concealed carry permit holders stopped 51.5 percent of active shootings, compared to 44.6 percent stopped by police.”

Not only do permit holders succeed in stopping active shooters at a higher rate, but law enforcement officers face significantly greater risks when intervening. Our research found police were nearly six times more likely to be killed and 17 percent more likely to be wounded than armed civilians.

We have a running tribute page for officers killed in the line of duty. You can find those on our End of Watch page.

Lott lays out many of the specifics, including one specifically relevant to the Boulder study: “Was the shooting they prevented likely to be a mass public shooting? In 58 cases (32 percent).”

As the author of More Guns, Less Crime, Lott knows the subject quite well. He knows that while crime with guns, especially of the “mass shooting” variety, gets a lot of media attention, the better and largely untold story is that the rise in law-abiding American citizens carrying firearms is having a positive impact on society. Once again, it turns out that the Founders were right and that exercising constitutional rights is a good thing.

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