Lott to Newsmax: Gun-Free Zones Are ‘Magnets’ for Attacks

Dr. John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, told Newsmax Tuesday that gun-free zones are “magnets” for gun crime because the criminals know that people are unarmed and cannot defend themselves.

“The people that these laws stop are law-abiding citizens and the killers take advantage of that,” Lott said during an appearance on Newsmax’s “The Chris Salcedo Show.” “The fact that they know that law-abiding citizens will obey these laws and that these gun-free zones mean nobody can protect themselves in those areas actually encourage the attacks to occur – it’s a magnet for those attacks.”

“Would you want to put a sign in front of your home that says your home is a gun-free zone if you were being threatened?” he continued. “I don’t think anybody would go and do that. It’s not like the criminal would go and say, ‘Well, he doesn’t have any guns there, they’re not allowed. I can’t go in and do the attack.’ It actually causes them to want to attack there.”

Commenting on the Nashville, Tennessee attack on a private Christian school by a former student that left three children and three adults dead on Monday, Lott said that “media bias has helped contribute to this problem.”

“One of the things that the media just refuses to report on are the parts of the diaries and manifestos where these mass murders explain why they picked the targets that they do,” he explained. “I mean, look at the Buffalo grocery store mass murderer last year. He had a long discussion in his manifesto about why he picked the place that he did. He wanted to go to a place where he said victims would not have permitted concealed handguns to defend themselves because, he said, that would make it much more difficult for him to go and kill people. He’s not the only one. They say that time after time.”

“What you need is armed teachers,” he said. “We have 20 states in this country, including parts of Texas, which have armed teachers. We have thousands of schools, yet there’s not been one single attack where anybody has been killed or wounded in any school that has an armed teacher there. All the attacks have occurred in places where guns are banned.”

Nashville Police Chief John Drake identified the suspect in The Covenant School attack as Audrey Elizabeth Hale, 28, and said that she identified as male. While there was no immediate official word on a possible motive, Drake told NBC News, “There’s some belief that there was some resentment for having to go to that school. Don’t have all the details to that just yet.”

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