Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee parroted the debunked claim that most mass shootings happen in places where guns are banned, and that one gun-toting citizen with a weapon could have stopped the rampage in Thursday night’s undercard Republican presidential debate.
Asked about what the federal government can do to stop guns from falling into the wrong hands, Huckabee said on Fox Business Network that President Obama keeps “pushing ideas that never worked.”
“Of course we want to stop gun violence, but the one common thing that has happened in most mass shootings is that they happened in gun-free zones where people who would have been law-abiding citizens who could have stood up and at least tried to stop it were not allowed to under the law,” he answered.
It’s a seductive argument for the pro-gun crowd, and one Huckabee’s fellow 2016 Republicans have also employed. But there’s no data to back up the claim that the gunmen who carry out mass shootings strike where they know guns are banned.
In a 2013 analysis of mass shootings over the last 30 decades, Mother Jones found zero of the 62 shootings analyzed involved a killer targeting a gun-free zone. Instead, there was often a motive behind the location of the rampage, like a workplace where they were spurned or a school they once attended.
