For years, gun control activists have sought to “debunk” the so called “good guy with a gun myth” in an effort to pass more stringent controls on one of our nation’s most cherished liberties. In support of this agenda, the federal government in conjunction with legacy media has sought to suppress the abundant evidence in support of the truth that armed, law-abiding citizens are one of the most effective deterrents against public mass casualty attacks.
For instance, in 2022, 22-year-old Elisjsha Dicken stopped a mass public shooting using his legally carried concealed handgun. The story became an unusual instance in which the national media covered this heroic action. But an Associated Press headline claimed: “Rare in US for an active shooter to be stopped by bystander.” Meanwhile, a Washington Post headline declared: “Rampage in Indiana a rare instance of armed civilian ending mass shooting.”
That same year, Time Magazine published an article politicizing the tragic school shooting in Uvalde, arguing that local law enforcement’s controversial response proves that “good guys with guns keep failing to stop mass shootings.”
Meanwhile, the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) under the Biden Administration has sought to suppress data proving that armed citizens help prevent crime by removing its estimates of defensive gun uses from its website. For almost a decade, the CDC referenced a 2013 National Academies of Sciences report noting that people used guns to stop crime anywhere from about 64,000 to 3 million times a year.
This decision was taken after gun control activist Mark Bryant, founder of the Gun Violence Archive, lobbied the CDC to remove “misinformation” regarding defensive gun use estimates because of they are cited by “gun rights folks” to stop gun control legislation. Soon after, the CDC took down these estimates and now lists no numbers.
The FBI has also shown itself to be susceptible to political pressure. The FBI defines an active shooter attack as occurring when an individual actively kills or attempts to kill people in a populated, public area. This measure includes everything from just one person shot at, even if the target isn’t hit, to a mass public shooting. It doesn’t include, however, shootings involving other crimes, such as robbery or fighting over drug turf.
To compile its list, the FBI hired researchers at Texas State University. Police departments don’t record these cases, so the researchers relied on Google searches to find news stories about these incidents. As such, the FBI’s evidence relies on a dataset that is actively hostile to the truth.
During 2020 and the beginning of 2021, I worked as the senior advisor for research and statistics at the U.S. Department of Justice. My job included evaluating the FBI’s active shooting reports. During my time with the DOJ, I discovered that the FBI either missed or misidentified many cases of civilians using guns to stop attacks. For instance, the FBI continues to report that armed citizens stopped only 14 of the 350 active shooter cases that it identified in the ten years from 2014 to 2023.
The Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), which I run, has found many more missed cases and is keeping an updated list. As such, the CPRC numbers tell a much different story: Out of 515 active shooter incidents from 2014 to 2023, armed citizens stopped 180, saving countless innocent lives. Our numbers even excluded 27 cases where a law-abiding citizen with a gun stopped an attacker before he could fire a shot.
Overall, the CPRC estimates that law-abiding citizens with guns have stopped over 35 percent of active shootings over the last decade and 39.6 percent in the last five years. This figure is eight times higher than the four percent estimate made by the FBI.
This figure increases even more when controlling only for areas where citizens are legally allowed to carry a firearm; after all, you can’t except that law-abiding citizens will stop attacks in gun-free zones. In places where law-abiding citizens are allowed to carry firearms, we estimate that armed civilians stopped 51 percent of active shootings over the past decade. Over the last five years, that figure was 53.1 percent.
One such case ignored by the FBI occurred in Conyers, Georgia in 1999 when an active shooter at Heritage High School was disarmed by an assistant principal. When I presented this case, among others, to the FBI, a bureau official acknowledged that “the FBI did not come across this incident during its research in 2015, but it does meet the FBI’s active-shooter definition.”
When questioned about their omission of this and other instances, the reason the bureau official gave for this mistake was that their reports “are limited in scope.” It’s not surprising that researchers miss cases or occasionally misidentify them. But the FBI refuses to fix its errors and even the blatant omissions that I pointed out have still not been corrected.
The FBI dataset is missing so many defensive gun uses that it’s hard to believe it isn’t intentional and the fact that they never correct mistakes that are brought to their attention is even more damning. All the while, the news media unquestioningly reports the FBI’s numbers, actively distorting the truth regarding the pivotal rule responsible gun owners have played in preventing crime and limiting casualties during mass public shootings.
