Gun safety expert: push to ban guns for those under 21 would have little or no effect on mass shootings

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Should school teachers, administrators be armed?

Crime Prevention Research Center's John Lott on efforts to prevent school shootings.

As high school students staged a national walkout, gun control advocates have called for laws raising the age for gun purchases to 21, but one report shows this would have little if any impact.

The Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) released a new report looking into the age distribution of mass public shooters in America, with a particular emphasis on whether raising the age of those purchasing guns would have made any difference in recent mass shootings.

CPRC President John Lott, Jr. concludes that, if the motivation for raising the age limit for gun ownership to 21 is the Parkland massacre, it’s “misplaced.”

Lott points to academic research, which he says is completely ignored by gun control advocates.

“We are all looking for magic bullets to stop crime, but it creates real problems,” Lott told Fox News. “It prevents 20-year-old women who were stalked from having guns for protection.”

He adds that previous research has shown increases in federal and state minimum age requirements found increases in murder rates and no effect on other crime rates.

His findings also show raising the age wouldn’t have prevented the Florida shooting.

Over the last 20 years, 85 percent of the mass public shootings were committed by people over 21 and half of those under 21 were already banned from purchasing guns.

Like gun control advocates and the students walking out of their schools, Lott said he is frustrated by the inability to stop the mass public shootings, but he says their proposed policies wouldn’t have stopped any of the attacks.

“What is so frustrating is that they don’t want to consider doing something that would work, like dealing with the fact that 98 percent of the mass public shootings keep on occurring in places where we ban general citizens from defending themselves,” Lott said. “These killers keep saying that they pick places where people don’t have guns to protect themselves.”

Lott points to the 25 states that allow teachers and staff to carry guns in varying degrees, adding “there have been no attacks in those schools and no problems.”