A leading expert on firearms violence says President Barack Obama's call for expanded gun control laws following the Oregon community college shootings on Thursday will not work.
"He goes out, pushes for these expanded background checks, Hillary Clinton did the same thing yesterday, before we even know the facts in this case," John Lott Jr., president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, said Friday on "The Steve Malzberg Show" on
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"We don't even know how the individual obtained the gun and besides that, Oregon since the beginning of August has had this type of law that everybody's pushing, so it doesn't seem like it stopped it in Oregon's case.
"Even more importantly, none of these shootings the president talked about – he mentioned 15 times he's been out to talk about them – would have been stopped by any of the laws he's been talking about, particularly the one he keeps on pushing on these expanded background checks."
On Thursday, a heavily-armed man identified as Chris Harper-Mercer stormed Oregon's Umpqua Community College, killed 10 people and injured 20, before being shot dead by police.
Lott said other countries around the world have far higher shooting rampage fatalities.
"The United States ranks about ninth compared to countries in Europe in terms of either the rate of these mass public shootings or the fatalities from them," he said.
"The thing you have to take into account to some extent is a lot of these European countries are a lot smaller. You know 4 million, 8 million, you may have 40 million people, Germany maybe 80 million.
"But we're over 320 million people and so you have to kind of adjust a little bit for the population differences. If you take Europe as a whole, there's not a big difference in the per capita rate of mass public shootings compared to the United States."
Lott's group describes itself as a research and education organization "dedicated to conducting academic quality research on the relationship between laws regulating the ownership or use of guns, crime, and public safety."
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