“I think it is well timed and I think it will be, you know, something that will be mentioned in the assault weapon ban case,” Dr. John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, told the DCNF. “It’s going to come up before the Supreme Court because it will give people an estimate of how commonly all these types of guns are and that even, and I think that will be a major part, something that the court will consider.” . . .
Harold Hutchison, “Survey Spells Bad News For Anti-Gunners,” Daily Caller, September 7, 2026.
How often do “good guys with a gun” stop crazed gunmen? According to the FBI, out of 408 active shooter incidents between 2014 and 2025, 16 were stopped by civilians exercising their Second Amendment rights. The Crime Prevention Research Center reports a radically different number. Out of 615 shooting incidents the CPRC identified, armed civilians ended 225 of them. The CPRC also suggests that 35 other incidents were likely stopped before the attacker started firing. CPRC President John Lott says the FBI’s undercount is concerning; the FBI claims to make “every effort” to identify cases where armed civilians stop attacks, but Lott says the bureau refused to update its numbers despite his efforts to highlight cases that meet the FBI’s criteria. Lott explained the need to update the numbers: “These reports are used by the media; they’re used in legislative debates.” . . .
Editors, “Friday Executive News Summary,” The Patriot Post, September 11, 2026.
Dr. John R. Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center is a scientist gun grabbers love to hate. They routinely attack his conclusions, but can’t damage his methodology or data, which he makes freely available, unlike most anti-gun propagandists. He notes:
“[T]hat 2.5 million number needs to be killed, buried, dug up, killed again and buried again,” Mark Bryant, who runs the Gun Violence Archive (GVA), wrote to CDC officials in September 2021 after meeting with them. Bryant complained that because of the 2.5 million estimate, “gun violence policy has ground to a halt.” But government officials should not censor research or data simply because advocates believe the information makes it harder to advance their preferred policies.
The Justice Department’s National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) estimates roughly 64,000 to 120,000 defensive firearm uses annually, placing it at the very low end of survey estimates. Researchers have conducted roughly 20 surveys on defensive gun use. Three produced estimates of about 800,000 defensive uses annually with handguns, while most of the others produced estimates exceeding one million, with the highest reaching about 3.5 million. The average estimate is roughly two million. In 2021, Georgetown University’s William English surveyed 16,708 gun owners and estimated approximately 1.67 million defensive gun uses annually.
That’s the kind of honesty and ethical science gun grabbers find so objectionable. In social science, methodology is supremely important. The NCVS survey asks people if they have been crime victims. Only if they answer “yes” are they asked about defensive gun use. People who repel crooks without firing a shot commonly don’t report the incident and don’t think themselves victims, thus explaining low-end results. Even that’s not enough for gun grabbers:
Devin Hughes, who runs the gun-control group GVPedia, argued in a July 6, 2021, email that the CDC should instead rely on the Gun Violence Archive’s defensive-gun-use count. Hughes described GVA as “the most widely accepted compendium of gun violence data.” Yet GVA’s methodology produces dramatically lower defensive-gun-use estimates because it relies heavily on incidents reported by the news media.
As Lott notes, the problem is that “newsworthiness doesn’t provide a representative sample of defensive gun uses.” The media misses defensive gun uses never reported to the police and often refuses to report anything positive about guns and gun owners, such as that 95% of defensive uses don’t fire a shot.
Democrats often accuse President Trump of non-transparency, despite the fact that he’s the most transparent President in memory, constantly engaging with the press. Lott concludes with this: . . .
A new analysis is challenging federal statistics on defensive gun use, with the Crime Prevention Research Center arguing that armed civilians stopped more than one-third of the active-shooter incidents it identified over a 12-year period — nearly 10 times the rate obtained from the FBI cases the organization reviewed.
The dispute centers on how active-shooter incidents and civilian interventions are identified, classified and counted, and comes as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has restored information about defensive gun use that disappeared from its website in 2022.
Gun-control organizations have long disputed arguments surrounding the “good guy with a gun” and have challenged estimates frequently cited by gun-rights advocates about how often firearms are used defensively.
The Crime Prevention Research Center, or CPRC, says its review of incidents from 2014 through 2025 produced a substantially different picture from federal active-shooter reports.
According to CPRC President John R. Lott Jr., the organization identified 615 incidents meeting the FBI’s active-shooter definition during that period and found 225 in which armed citizens stopped the attacker. CPRC excluded another 35 cases in which an armed civilian intervened before the prospective attacker fired a shot.
The resulting figure was 36.6%. . . .
But what about illegal alien criminals? When caught, many of these face serious charges here in the United States, and our gut instincts tell us they should face trial and punishment right here, as opposed to being repatriated and presumably letting their home countries deal with them.
The costs are indeed considerable, and the price to simply send the crooks back is typically a lot less. A recent report by Dr. John Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) has some of those numbers. One case in particular is telling.
“Take the case of Isaac Melendez-Carranza, an illegal alien from El Salvador, who was recently arrested for allegedly selling fentanyl to students at Park View High School in Loudoun County, Virginia. Investigators linked him to at least two student overdoses, though Narcan saved both students. A judge ordered Melendez-Carranza deported in July 2024. Federal immigration authorities encountered him the following month, during the Biden administration, but took no enforcement action against him.
The cost of getting a conviction are substantial.”
“Substantial” doesn’t seem to cover it. Here are some of those numbers:
“If this illegal alien (Isaac Melendez-Carranza) agrees to a plea bargain, the estimated total government costs for a case like this (Virginia state felony fentanyl distribution near a school in Loudoun County) range from roughly $50,000–$100,000+. If the charge proceeds to a full contested trial, the expected total government cost (trial process + Loudoun County jail time only while awaiting and during trial) is roughly $90,000–$150,000. Unfortunately, the State of Virginia is very unlikely to turn him over to ICE immediately upon conviction for early deportation in place of serving the criminal sentence, so the total cost of a contested trial and prison could be as high as $600,000+. Even a Plea bargain + short sentence (e.g., time served + 1–2 years prison/jail): could be as high as $150,000 total. The total legal costs for violent crimes such as aggravated assault, robbery, rape, and murder would be much higher.”
Taken all in all, with the number of illegal aliens we know about, the number that have been captured since President Trump reassumed office, and the estimates of the cost to the taxpayers is expected to exceed $100 billion. Dr. Lott has those numbers, too.
Now assume the government had to prosecute and convict all 248,000 illegal aliens arrests up through August 29th based on only charges for crimes—even if only for a drug offense—before it could deport them. At a minimum expense of $150,000 per case, prosecuting all 236,000 illegal aliens would cost taxpayers $37.2 billion. At $600,000 or more per case, the total cost would exceed $148.8 billion.
. . . [Much More]
“I think it is well timed and I think it will be, you know, something that will be mentioned in the assault weapon ban case,” Dr. John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, told the DCNF. “It’s going to come up before the Supreme Court because it will give people an estimate of how commonly all these types of guns are and that even, and I think that will be a major part, something that the court will consider.” . . .
Harold Hutchison, “Survey spells bad news for anti-gunners,” BizPacReview, September 7, 2026.
An Associated Press review of the six contested swing states found fewer than 475 possible fraud cases, against a combined margin of victory of 311,257 votes. At the same time, scholars such as John Lott have argued for statistical anomalies that could indicate surplus votes in some counties. . . .
“POSTSTEMMER OG MULIG SVINDEL I TYSKLAND?” UtenFilter (Norway), September 7, 2026.
In the days after Greenwood, much of the national press reached for FBI statistics to frame what Dicken did as a near impossibility. Reuters wrote that “it is rare for a bystander to stop an ‘active shooter’ attack in the United States,” pointing to an FBI report showing only two of 61 such attacks the prior year ended when “citizens engaged the shooter.” CNN called cases of an armed bystander confronting an active shooter “rare.” The Associated Press, the Washington Post, and the New York Times ran headlines to the same effect, and Politifact, citing the same FBI reports, said it “rarely happens.”
CPRC’s review of the FBI’s active shooter reports from 2014 through 2025 puts the share of attacks stopped by armed civilians at no less than 36.6 percent, not the 3.9 percent the FBI numbers imply. Set aside attacks in gun-free zones, the one category where a permit holder is barred from carrying in the first place, and CPRC says the average climbs above 52.9 percent. For 2025 alone, the group puts it at 58.3 percent.
The FBI’s own definition is broad. The Bureau counts an active shooter as one or more people actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a public place, excluding gang violence and crimes such as robbery. That sweeps in everything from a single missed shot to a mass public shooting. And the FBI’s reports do credit armed civilians with stopping attacks in eight of the twelve years reviewed. The cases exist in the Bureau’s own data. CPRC’s argument is that far more of them exist than the Bureau ever lists, and it has published its spreadsheet and the underlying news stories for anyone who wants to check the work.
When John Stossel asked the FBI about the omissions, the Bureau’s answer, as CPRC quotes it, was that its data is “not intended to explore all active shooting incidents but rather to provide a baseline understanding.” That is a fair thing for a research office to say about a baseline. It is not a fair basis for a headline calling Greenwood a fluke, and that gap between what the FBI says its data is and what reporters used it for is the whole problem. . . .
Indeed, protection is far and away the most common reason gun owners give for why they own a gun. A glance through the NRA’s reports, the Crime Prevention Research Center’s log of DGUs, or other news sources (here and here) shows that DGUs overall are very real and documented events. . . .
“UNHEALTHY EXPOSURE: GUN BAN ADVOCATES ALLERGIC TO DEFENSIVE GUN USE,” NRA-ILA, September 8, 2026.
Every so often, absurd—yet sometimes popular—ideas regarding firearms emerge. Since violence has spiraled out of control following the government’s 2017 decision to allow the entry of thousands upon thousands of highly violent Venezuelan criminals, some naive people believe that disarming honest, law-abiding citizens will reduce violence. In reality, the opposite is true: “More [legal] guns, less crime”—the title of an interesting book by John Lott, which uses statistics to demonstrate this counterintuitive fact. The problem in Peru lies not in the firearms law itself, but in the corruption of the agency that administers it, Sucamec—a situation we hope will change under the new government. . . .
Fernando Rospigliosi, “El arma de fuego,” Expresso, September 14, 2026.
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