Armed citizens are the best defense against a lot of horrific events. Look at things like the shooting at a church in White Settlement, Texas, or the mass shooting at the Greenwood Park Mall for just two examples.
However, armed citizens stop a lot of more pedestrian crimes, too, to say nothing of the cases when wild or aggressive animals need to be taken down to protect human life.
In the gun debate, folks on the pro-gun side often bring up these people as examples of why our gun rights matter.
However, these folks also get downplayed by the anti-gunners, who claim they’re not that common anyway. They cite a lot of statistics they think make their case, and some of them are just stupid to invoke, but one would imagine FBI data might be a bit better.
As the NRA’s Institute for Legal Affairs notes, that would be a bad idea.
Three years ago, Dr. John Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), writing for RealClearInvestigations, described how the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) was vastly undercounting, “by an order of more than three the number of instances in which armed citizens” had thwarted attacks in public places. Out of 252 “active shooter incidents” the FBI identified in 2014 to 2021, it stated that only 11 were stopped by an armed citizen; in contrast, an analysis by the CPRC using the same definition identified 281 active shooter incidents in the same period, with 41 being stopped by an armed citizen.
Broken down into percentages, the FBI’s data indicated 4.4% of active shooters were impeded by armed citizens, while the CPRC found it to be the much more compelling 14.6%. (The CPRC also found many cases where civilians intervened before the suspects fired their weapons, but which weren’t included in the count because they did not fit the FBI “active shooter incident” criteria.)
At the time that article appeared, the discrepancy was attributed to misclassified shootings (e.g., in which the role of armed civilians was inaccurately credited to security professionals) and overlooked incidents (in which the part armed citizens played was unnoticed or ignored).
The FBI was asked to correct this pattern of distortion and omission but refused to do so. Lott’s new follow-up article with RCI, published this month, states that the agency not only persists with the incorrect reporting, but the problem has become even worse.
His latest article, Unaccountable: The FBI’s Strange Refusal to Fix Key Crime Stat (Oct. 2, 2025), points out that between 2022 to 2024, the FBI has reported just three new incidents of armed civilians stopping active shooters and none in the last two years. The CPRC, meanwhile, has documented 78 such cases over the same period.
That’s a major discrepancy, and one that could have massive ramifications on political discourse surrounding the Second Amendment.
Look, I don’t want the FBI taking sides on political matters. They’ve done that for a few years and, as we’ve all seen, it doesn’t work out very well at all. It doesn’t create a just society; it just turns federal law enforcement into a secret police force that goes after enemies of the current administration.
And honestly, this is just more of the same.
They’re accumulating data in a way that undermines the case for gun rights as best they can. Why? Because empowering the federal bureaucracy, including the FBI, is the goal of far too many bureaucrats. It doesn’t matter if they’re in the FBI, the Department of Justice as a whole, the State Department, or the Department of the freaking Interior. Bureaucracy exists to advance the bureaucracy.
And when a sizeable portion of that bureaucracy is filled with anti-gun jihadists pretending to be unbiased public servants, you get “statistics” that seek to make the anti-gun case, and pretend it’s just unbiased research.
It’s hard to see this undercounting as anything but an intentional effort to undermine the pro-Second Amendment argument, and it’s being done on our dime as American taxpayers.
It needs to end.
Now.
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