Dear editor:
Cowboy State Daily recently published a guest column written by Senator Cheri Steinmetz and John Lott, the president of the Crime Prevention Research Center.
This column, again, uses the fiction that 94% of mass public shootings occur in gun free zones.
This statistic, from John Lott and his Center, has been used endlessly by the right and the gun lobby as it is the only research that supports their claims.
The research done by Lott and the findings he published as a result of his research have been severely criticized by prominent academics and researchers that question the flaws in his work.
The New Yorker magazine published an in-depth article on Lott in November of 2022 entitled The Shoddy Conclusions of the Man Shaping the Gun – Rights Debate.
One of the statements made in the column is “Only at schools where guns are banned have people been wounded or killed in school shootings.”
Research has totally debunked this claim.
A peer-reviewed research paper published in the Lancet last year examined active shooting cases and found that such shootings are more likely to occur in areas that allow firearms than those that don't, and other research finds that 10-20% of mass shootings actually occur in Gun Free Zones.
Whether in schools or public places the majority of mass shootings happen in places where guns are allowed.
Public polls in Wyoming have shown over and over that the citizens of Wyoming like the gun laws that they currently have: they want local control for school districts and they do not want to prohibit gun free zones but agree with the U. S. Supreme Court that there are special areas that should remain gun free.
The gun lobby in the legislature continues to push gun bills that the citizens of Wyoming do not want.
Sincerely,
Linda Burt, Cheyenne
