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.
According to Lott, an FBI report compiled for the Biden administration for 2023 and 2024 “contains worse errors. It asserts that armed civilians stopped none of the 72 active shooting cases it identified.” This is especially disturbing because the CPRC found there were actually 121 active shooter cases, of which 45 were ended due to an armed citizen, including “eight cases that likely would have resulted in mass public shootings with four or more people murdered.”
These data discrepancies, as Lott acknowledges, may be due to many factors – local police departments don’t track active shooting incidents separately as a class, and the FBI relies on outside researchers using media crime reports as the basis for its statistics, when these underlying crime reports may themselves be incomplete or inaccurate. The CPRC, however, tested its own findings by providing its entire list of cases to a researcher at the university compiling the FBI’s data, who objected to just two of the incidents the CPRC included and the FBI missed. Thereafter, the university “declined to respond to repeated requests for comment.” (Further up the food chain, the FBI reportedly “declined to comment” as well.)
The reason why the FBI’s skewed figures (and consistent underrepresentation of the role of lawfully armed civilians) are so important is that the agency’s statistics are relied on as authoritative by the mainstream news media, researchers, in court cases and legislative debates on gun laws and policy.
A Washington Post article on a 2022 active shooter incident at a shopping mall that ended due to the intervention of an armed civilian described the incident as “unique,” adding that in “recent studies of more than 430 ‘active shooter incidents’ dating back to 2000, the FBI found that civilians killed gunmen in just 10 cases.”
Gun control advocates use the FBI statistics to bolster claims that good guys with guns don’t stop mass shootings and that carrying by private individuals is more likely to harm public safety than not. A 2017 “fact” sheet by the Center for American Progress, for instance, claims “there is very little evidence suggesting that civilians can effectively serve this role,” backing that up with a statement that “an FBI study of 160 active-shooting incidents from 2000 to 2013 found that only one was stopped by an individual with a valid firearms permit.” Brady United claims that “[t]here is no widely endorsed research that expanding public carry – especially concealed carry – has any public safety benefits. Firearms are rarely used successfully in self-defense…When a firearm is present, a situation that could have been diffused may instead end in injury or death.”
Contrary to such assertions, Lott’s CPRC has separately documented, in a study published this year, that lawfully armed civilians stopped active shooter attacks “more frequently and faced a lower risk of being killed or injured than police.” Armed civilians have the advantage of being able to intervene immediately anywhere where carrying concealed is allowed and outnumber on-duty police officers by a wide margin. There were approximately 671,000 full-time sworn law enforcement officers in 2020 (and there’s some indication the numbers have dropped since then). “If only a third are on duty at any given time, that leaves about 223,667 officers to protect a population of 340 million—less than 0.1% of the population.” In contrast, the study points out that in 2024, “21.5 million Americans—about 8.2% of adults—held concealed handgun permits (Lott et al., 2024). In addition, 29 states allowed Constitutional Carry, which requires no permit at all. Surveys show that 7.2% of likely voters carry all the time, and another 8.4% carry some of the time.”
The study examined 180 active shooting cases in which a concealed handgun permit holder stopped an active shooting attack. There was only one case each (0.56%) of a concealed handgun permit holder accidentally shooting a bystander or having their handgun taken away, and no instances where the permit holder “got in the way of police.” Police officers shot and killed the wrong person in four cases (two in which another officer was accidentally shot, and two involving innocent bystanders), meaning the rate at which police accidentally shoot bystanders was over twice the rate at which armed civilians cause such harm (1.14% versus 0.56%). Most significantly, the CPRC found that armed civilians with concealed handgun permits appeared to be more effective, overall, at stopping an active shooting event than law enforcement. Such civilians “stopped 51.5% of the active shootings in non-gun-free zones, [while] police stopped 44.6% of the cases.”
All of this takes on sharper relevance against the backdrop of H.R. 38, the “Constitutional Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of 2025.” The bipartisan bill, a top priority for the NRA, would establish a federal statutory framework to facilitate the carry or possession of concealed firearms interstate, freeing law-abiding carriers from dealing with the intricacies of the current confusing and ever-changing patchwork of reciprocity and recognition provisions.
The evidence consistently supports the argument that lawfully armed civilians enhance rather than endanger public safety, as recently recognized by the chief law officers of almost half of all states. A letter to the leadership of the U.S. House of Representatives and signed by the Attorneys General of 24 states urged that body to pass H.R. 38 because “[c]oncealed carry is a constitutional right, and it can have substantial public safety benefits by allowing people the means to respond to emergent threats to themselves or others when police are not immediately available to intervene.”
In the meantime, given the importance of the FBI as an ostensible source of trustworthy government information, the agency should revisit its statistics and update its data on armed citizens. All of the cases missed by the FBI (along with links to the underlying sources) are helpfully available at a link included in the RCI article.
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