Firearms Owners Against Crime
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
A stunning new report from the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) says there have been “massive errors” in the FBI’s reports on active shooters in which armed citizens stopped the attacks, and a well-known scholar with extensive background on defensive gun uses says the FBI database of active shooters “cannot be trusted.”
The report, “Active Shooter Incidents in the United States in 2021,” identifies 360 “active shooter incidents” in the years spanning 2014-2021, including 124 in which an armed private citizen stopped the mayhem. But, as noted by Fox News, “The FBI identified 252 active shooter incidents during the same time period, with only 11 thwarted by armed citizens.”
Professor emeritus Gary Mauser at Simon Fraser University in Burnaby, British Columbia is quoted in the report observing, “Whether deliberately through bias or just incompetence, the FBI database of active shooters cannot be trusted.”
The issue of defensive gun uses and active shooter misinformation was discussed at the Gun Rights Policy Conference by author and researcher John Lott, founder of the CPRC, now based in Montana. He told the audience about some of the research the center did last year, identifying stories about defensive gun uses during the first nine months. He said the five top newspapers in the country—the New York Times, Washington Post, the L.A. Times, USA Today and the Wall Street Journal—had a total of ten stories between them about such gun uses. Many of those reports noted something went wrong.
“By contrast,” Lott said, “they had something like 1,700 news stories about people being either murdered or wounded with guns. If you included gunshots by criminals, you had over 2,700 news stories. If you look at CNN and MSNBC, they had zero defensive gun stories over that period of time last year.”
Mauser told Ammoland via email, “Lott has the right of it. He is most meticulous in his analyses.”
For someone who follows news “religiously,” Lott said it would be easy to conclude that defensive gun uses virtually never occur, and the few times they do happen, something goes wrong.
Lott’s presentation at the conference may be seen near the end of this video.
The CPRC report notes, “What is particularly troubling is the unwillingness of the FBI and the media to correct these omissions when informed about them. When Dr. John Lott worked at the US Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Policy and the Office of Justice Programs in 2020, the FBI was notified of their omissions involving potential mass public shootings, but they refused to correct those errors. Lott had previously alerted the FBI to similar problems back in 2015 and he published the list in the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences Today in March 2015, but corrections were never made even after the FBI admitted they were missing cases.”
According to the Washington Examiner, Lott “found that some 34%” of the active shooter incidents during his study years (2014-2021) “were stopped by armed citizens, not the 4% cited by the FBI and often used by the media to dismiss the importance of legally armed citizens.”
Perhaps even more disconcerting, the CPRC report states, “Requests to the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center on exactly how much of their $66.9 million in grants from the US Department of Justice (here and here) were spent on putting together the FBI’s list of active shooting cases has never been answered.”
Writing at RealClearInvestigations.com this past August, Lott stated, “Evidence compiled by the organization I run, the Crime Prevention Research Center, and others suggest that the FBI undercounts by an order of more than three the number of instances in which armed citizens have thwarted such attacks, saving untold numbers of lives.”
He added, “there is no evidence that these acts have harmed innocent victims.”
The CPRC report quotes Prof. Carl Moody of William & Mary University, who serves as the group’s research director.
“The media and gun control advocates always seem concerned with the worst possible outcomes when firearms are involved,” Moody states. “We know that armed citizens do, in fact, stop active shooters. And while there’s a possibility of a bystander getting hurt, the data put together by the CPRC show that an armed citizen has yet to accidentally shoot an innocent bystander. We also know that the police have accidentally shot the hero citizen just once. That was in Colorado on June 21, 2021. That’s not something that would normally happen, because the police usually arrive long after the incident is resolved.”
The Fox News report recalled the incident earlier this year at the Greenwood Mall in Indiana, where legally-armed 22-year-old Elisjsha Dicken successfully stopped a would-be mass shooter just seconds after the killer opened fire in the mall food court area. At a distance estimated to be 40 yards, Dicken began firing ten rounds of which eight hit the shooter, fatally wounding him. He was hailed as a hero by Greenwood Police Chief James Ison.
However, the Fox story noted, “Liberal-leaning media outlets jumped on the story and downplayed it, arguing that it is rare for a legal gun owner to stop a mass shooting. Some news stories pointed to the FBI data as evidence such instances are rare.”
But RealClearInvestigations.com has posted a list of armed citizen interventions overlooked—or omitted—from the FBI cases, dating back to 2014. There are 25 incidents included on the list.
Many in the firearms community believe such incidents go unreported because they do not “fit the narrative” that guns are bad and citizens with guns rarely use them properly to thwart mayhem.
That situation may gradually change as more people than ever before are licensed to carry defensive sidearms, and 25 states now allow permitless carry, so it probably cannot be accurately estimated just how many private citizens are legally packing.
What does seem clear is that available data does not accurately reflect the number of times an armed citizen intervenes to prevent carnage, but if it continues to happen, neither the FBI or the media will be able to overlook or ignore such cases.