The Washington Post's Wonkblog debunked Donald Trump's debate assertion that places that do not allow guns attract mass shooters, concluding that “little data supports this claim.”

During the October 28 CNBC GOP debate, Trump said, “I feel that the gun-free zones and, you know, when you say that, that's target practice for the sickos and for the mentally ill. That's target [practice]. They look around for gun-free zones.”

Wonkblog's Christopher Ingraham concluded in an October 29 article that “little data supports this claim,” before offering three reasons why Trump was wrong.

As Ingraham explained, an analysis of public mass shootings shows that gunman do not choose their targets because of gun policies but rather “you typically find that gunmen have a grievance attached to a particular location” that forms the motive of the shooting.

Ingraham also cited an analysis of 110 mass shootings that occurred between January 2009 and July 2014 that “found that only 14 percent of those shootings took place in a so-called 'gun-free' zone.”

Lastly, Ingraham explained that the claim gunmen target “gun-free zones” relies on the assumption that the individuals who perpetrate these crimes are rational actors:

But little data supports this claim. For starters, if you probe the reasons why shooters target particular places, you typically find that gunmen have a grievance attached to a particular location. A Mother Jones analysis of mass shootings between 1982 and 2015 found not one single instance where the gunman appeared to be motivated by the knowledge that a place was gun-free.

Rather, gunmen usually had specific grievances that they chose to take out at certain locations: a workplace, or a federal facility, or a school, for instance. The FBI's 2014 study of 160 active shooter incidents found that in many cases, shooters had a specific connection either to the place where the shooting occurred, or with somebody who worked there.

And a 2014  analysis by a gun control group of 110 mass shooting incidents between January 2009 and July 2014 found that only 14 percent of those shootings took place in a so-called “gun-free” zone.

As Evan DeFilippis and Devin Hughes point out at The Trace, the claim that shooters target gun-free zones runs contrary to another claim frequently made by gun rights advocates: that mass shootings are primarily a function of mental health and not of gun laws. But the claim that mass shooters rationally seek out gun-free areas in order to encounter the least resistance runs a tension with the notion that shooters are mentally ill individuals with an irrational axe to grind.