Those who manipulate crime data can shape the political debate. The Trump administration has reversed some serious data manipulation that occurred during the Biden administration when it comes to crime.
At the request of gun control advocates, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) removed data from its website. The Trump administration has now restored the data, but it went a step further, correcting an important error in the original post.
That correction is a major accomplishment. But there are problems with data at the FBI and Department of Justice that still need to be corrected.
Getting the CDC Back in Line
A 2013 National Academies of Sciences (NAS) report, co-sponsored by the CDC, discussed research producing estimates of defensive gun uses ranging from about 500,000 annually at the lower end of national surveys to over three million. Yet the CDC posted a substantially different range of 60,000 to 2.5 million defensive gun uses per year.
During the Biden administration, the White House and Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois connected gun control advocates with CDC officials. The advocates then met privately with CDC officials and exchanged numerous emails as they pressed the agency to remove its discussion of defensive gun use. Documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request revealed that the advocates objected in part because “gun rights folks” cited defensive-gun-use estimates to “stop [gun-control] legislation.”
By May 2022, the CDC removed the defensive-gun-use material from its website. It remained down until the Trump administration restored the original post in July 2026. Gun control organizations sharply criticized the decision. Michael Bloomberg-funded outlet The Trace, for example, ran the headline, “Inflated Claim About Guns and Self-Defense Returns to CDC Website.”
But the CDC’s range of 60,000 to 2.5 million defensive gun uses did not accurately describe what the 2013 NAS report said about national survey estimates. The NAS report cautioned that the National Crime Victimization Survey estimate was “difficult to interpret because respondents were not asked specifically about defensive gun use.” It then reported that estimates based on national surveys ranged from about 500,000 to more than 3 million defensive gun uses annually. Moreover, the 500,000 estimate limited defensive gun uses to just cases involving handguns.
The Trump administration has now corrected the lower end of the range from 60,000 to 500,000 defensive gun uses per year, bringing the CDC’s description into line with the lower end of the national survey estimates discussed by the NAS.
For years, gun control activists have tried to “debunk” what they call the “good guy with a gun myth” as they push for stricter limits on one of our nation’s most cherished liberties. The federal government and much of the legacy media have reinforced that narrative by downplaying evidence that armed, law-abiding citizens can stop public mass-casualty attacks.
Even dramatic defensive gun uses rarely receive national attention. One exception came in August, when Jordan Salinas fired at a gunman who was shooting at vehicles outside an In-N-Out restaurant in Twin Falls, Idaho. As one news report noted, Twin Falls County Sheriff Jack Johnson said the death toll would have been higher without the actions of Salinas and an off-duty police officer.
Since the beginning of 2025 alone, we have identified 15 defensive gun uses in which police made similar statements about armed civilians saving lives.
FBI Doubles Down on Data Errors
The FBI has also had its own data problems. The FBI defines an active shooter as someone actively killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area. The category can include an incident in which a gunman shoots at a single person and misses, as well as a mass public shooting. But it excludes shootings tied to other crimes, such as robberies or fights over drug turf.
I have seen politicized data firsthand. Until January 2021, I served at the U.S. Department of Justice as senior adviser for research and statistics in the Office of Justice Programs, where part of my job involved evaluating the FBI’s active shooter reports. During my time at DOJ, I found that the FBI had missed or misidentified many cases in which armed civilians stopped attacks. The FBI still reports that armed citizens stopped only 16 of the 408 active shooter incidents it identified from 2014 through 2025.
The Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), which I run, has identified many additional cases and maintains an updated list. Our numbers tell a very different story. From 2014 through 2025, we identified 615 active shooter incidents and found that armed citizens stopped 225 of them. We also excluded 35 cases in which a law-abiding citizen with a gun stopped an attacker before he could fire a shot.
Overall, the CPRC estimates that armed, law-abiding citizens stopped 36.6 percent of active-shooter attacks from 2014 through 2025 and 42.5 percent over the most recent five years. That is roughly 10 times the FBI’s estimate of about 4 percent.
The gap grows even larger when we look only at places where law-abiding citizens can legally carry firearms. We should not expect armed civilians to stop many attacks in gun-free zones, where the law prevents them from carrying. In places where citizens could legally carry firearms, we estimate that armed civilians stopped 52.9 percent of active-shooter attacks over the past 12 years.
The FBI has continually ignored requests from news outlets such as the Washington Post and Washington Times to explain these missing cases. When John Stossel asked the FBI about our claim that they had omitted many cases, the Bureau responded: “[Our data is] not intended to explore all active shooting incidents but rather to provide a baseline understanding . . .”
Texas State University’s researchers who helped put the FBI data together pointed to two cases that they didn’t think should be included in the hundreds that we found, but we pointed to seventeen cases that were otherwise identical to ones they did include, with the only difference being that the ones they didn’t include were stopped by civilians legally carrying guns.
Texas State University researchers who helped compile the FBI data questioned two of the hundreds of cases we identified. In response, we pointed to 17 cases that the FBI did include despite circumstances essentially identical to the two cases they said should be excluded. The only difference was that the ones they excluded had civilians legally carrying firearms stopping the attacks.
The FBI has omitted so many defensive gun uses that it becomes difficult to dismiss the pattern as accidental, especially because the agency has not corrected mistakes that I previously brought to its attention. And because we list each case and link to the underlying sources, no one has to take our word for it.
