Dr. John Lott has a new op-ed at Real Clear Politics.
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Whoever controls crime data can shape the political debate. The Trump administration has already reversed some of the changes the Biden administration made to federal crime and gun data, including information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). But politicization of data at the FBI and Justice Department still deserves attention.
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Gun-control activists have long tried to “debunk” what they call the “good guy with a gun myth” as they push for stricter gun-control laws. The federal government and much of the media have reinforced that argument by downplaying evidence that armed, law-abiding citizens stop public attacks.
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Even the most dramatic defensive gun uses rarely get national news coverage. One rare example of news coverage was in August of this year, when Jordan Salinas shot at a gunman who was shooting at vehicles outside a Twin Falls, Idaho, In-N-Out fast-food burger restaurant. As one news story noted, Twin Falls County Sheriff Jack Johnson said that “the death toll would have undoubtedly been higher without the quick-thinking actions of Salinas and the off-duty cop.”
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Just since the beginning of 2025, there have been 15 such defensive gun uses where police have made similar statements about armed civilians acting to save many lives.
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The CDC recently restored information on defensive gun use that it removed from its website in 2022 after gun-control advocates privately pressured agency officials to take it down. Until May 2022, the CDC cited a 2013 National Academies of Sciences report that the agency had co-sponsored. The report reviewed studies that produced widely varying estimates of defensive gun use. It cited an estimate of 108,000 defensive gun uses annually, but warns that “108,000 is difficult to interpret because respondents were not asked specifically about defensive gun use.” The report noted that estimates from national surveys ranged from about 500,000 to more than 3 million defensive gun uses per year.
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Mark Bryant, the founder of the Gun Violence Archive, was among gun control advocates who complained that gun-rights advocates had cited the estimates so often to “stop [gun-control]legislation.”
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The CDC has now restored its link to the National Academies report, but it misleadingly says the report puts defensive gun use at only 60,000 to 2.5 million defensive gun uses annually, not what the report itself says as the national survey estimates that specifically ask about defensive gun use range from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year, though even that fails to note that the lower estimate involves just handguns.
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The FBI has also demonstrated how badly federal data can understate defensive gun uses.
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The FBI defines an active shooter as “one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area.” The category can include an attack in which a gunman fires at a single person and misses, but it generally excludes shootings connected to other criminal activity, such as robberies or fights over drug turf.
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I have seen these problems with federal data firsthand. Until January 2021, I served in the U.S. Department of Justice as senior adviser for research and statistics in the Office of Justice Programs. Part of my job involved evaluating the FBI’s active-shooter reports. During my time at DOJ, I discovered that the FBI had missed or misidentified numerous cases in which armed civilians stopped active shooters.
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Unfortunately, the problem has continued with the newest report that was released on July 30. The FBI reports that armed citizens stopped only 16 of the 408 active-shooter incidents it identified from 2014 through 2025. And only two of the 34 active shooting cases in 2025.
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The Crime Prevention Research Center, which I run, has identified many additional cases that the FBI either missed or misclassified, and we maintain an updated list of these incidents.
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Our numbers tell a dramatically different story. From 2014 through 2025, the CPRC identified 615 active-shooter incidents and found that armed citizens stopped 225 of them. We excluded another 35 cases in which a law-abiding armed citizen stopped the attacker before he could fire a shot.
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That means armed citizens stopped 36.6% of the active-shooter incidents we identified over those 12 years. During the most recent five years, the figure rose to 42.5%. That rate is about 10 times the roughly 4% rate indicated by the FBI’s data.
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The difference becomes even larger when we examine only places where law-abiding citizens can legally carry firearms. We shouldn’t expect armed civilians to stop many attacks in places where the law prohibits them from carrying guns. In locations where citizens could legally carry firearms, our data show that armed civilians stopped 52.9% of active-shooter attacks over the past 12 years. And it is increasing, with 58.3% in 2025.
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The FBI has missed so many defensive gun uses that I find it hard to believe these omissions are simply accidental – particularly because the agency has failed to correct mistakes I previously brought to its attention.
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Fortunately, no one needs to take my word for it. The CPRC lists the individual cases and links to the underlying sources, so anyone can examine the cases and compare our list with the FBI’s data.
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John R. Lott, Jr., “CDC Undercounts Defensive Gun Uses,” Real Clear Politics, September 11, 2026.
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