A report by Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) president John Lott shows armed citizens stopped a third of all “active shooter incidents” from 2014 through 2025.
Lott then presented the CPRC data as a correction to FBI reports which claim armed citizens only topped 3.9 percent of the incidents.
He noted that during his time in the Department of Justice during President Trump’s first term, his duties “included evaluating the FBI’s active-shooter reports.” In so doing, he “discovered that the reports omitted or misclassified numerous cases in which armed civilians stopped attacks.”
Lott noted the FBI identified 418 “active shooter incidents” from 2014 through 2025 and credited armed citizens with stopping only 16 of them. CPRC, on the other hand, “identified 615 active-shooter incidents from 2014 through 2025 and found that armed citizens stopped 225 of them.”
Moreover, Lott wrote, “We excluded another 35 cases in which law-abiding armed citizens stopped attackers before they could fire a shot.”
Lott made clear the impetus for releasing this information was the establishment media’s coverage of the armed father who stopped the October 15, 2026, Silver Rail Elementary School attack. He pointed to an AP report on the incident which began, “Few mass shootings in the U.S. end like the deadly attack on an Oregon elementary school: with an armed civilian opening fire on the gunman.”
The AP gets information on “active shooter incidents” from the same database the FBI uses.
As crime researcher John Lott put it, “The U.S. has been running a real-time experiment on two approaches to criminal justice: the Biden-era emphasis on social justice versus the Trump administration’s embrace of traditional law and order. The results are now in.” . . .
As Lott notes, “Murder also declined sharply last year. The U.S. recorded about 4.1 murders per 100,000 people in 2025, a record low, down from roughly 5.1 per 100,000 in 2024.”
That’s all great news. Crime skyrocketed beginning in the summer of 2020 as Democrats exploited the death of George Floyd to exact a racial vendetta across the country. Ironically, blacks suffered the most because most of the crime was committed in their inner-city neighborhoods.
Trump promised to clean things up, even sending the National Guard to various cities — much to the consternation of Democrats. It worked. Lott points to the numbers in Washington, DC, and Memphis, Tennessee, to show the success of Trump’s National Guard deployment: . . .
“Surveys show that the share of general-election voters who carry concealed handguns increased from 24.3% in December 2024 to 30.9% in July 2026,” Lott says. “The increase has been especially pronounced among minority voters, who are the most likely victims of violent crime. Hispanic and black voters are 2.6 times as likely as white voters to report carrying all or most of the time.” . . .
Nate Jackson, “Violent Crime Nosedives,” The Patriot Post, October 27, 2026.
It is also noteworthy that crime researcher Dr. John Lott has pointed out that Bend’s school system banned concealed carry holders from bringing guns into schools several years ago, which would have prevented school staff from being prepared to defend themselves. . . .
More than one-third of “active shooter situations” in recent years were stopped by good guys with guns, according to a new study by the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) — completely blowing away the FBI’s official stats.
CPRC founder and former president John Lott wrote on Friday for NRO that his organization “identified 615 active-shooter incidents from 2014 through 2025 and found that armed citizens stopped 225 of them.”That’s 36.6% for those keeping score at home, or better than one in three.
I’ll have more on the FBI angle further down, but this being The Year of Our Bot-Lords 2026, there simply must be an AI angle —so here it is from the CPRC’s September report:
While we don’t in anyway rely on AI to create our list, since some put a weight on their abilities, we asked Grok 4.5 and ChatGPT to spot-check the cases we identified to determine whether the FBI should have included them on its active shooter list. Grok finds that our list of missing cases meet the FBI definition of active shooting cases and should have been included.
Lott’s NRO piece came across my desk courtesy of Breitbart’s AWR Hawkins, who added that Lott’s “impetus for releasing this information was the establishment media’s coverage of the armed father who stopped the October 15, 2026, Silver Rail Elementary School attack.”
Coverage? NPR, for example, tried to bury that part of the story by insisting — against the evidence meticulously gathered by Lott — “how rarely an armed civilian ends an attack like this.”
But get this. Lott said the CPRC “excluded another 35 cases in which law-abiding armed citizens stopped attackers before they could fire a shot.” So if anything, even those rabid, right-wing gun nuts were perhaps too conservative in establishing how many of these deadly attacks were stopped by an armed citizen.
“The Strange Case of the Gun That Didn’t Fire,” if this were a Sherlock Holmes adventure.
Good news aside, we have a couple of problems here.
The first is that Lott noted, “From 2014 through 2025, the FBI identified 408 active-shooter incidents but credited armed citizens with stopping only 16 — just 3.9 percent.”
In other words, the nation’s premier federal law enforcement agency undercounted good-guy-with-a-gun situations by 90%. . . .
Nobody knows what would have happened if a school resource officer had been there, but we know this: crime researcher John Lott has read all the school shooter manifestos and all the scribblings by these psycho killers always consider their threat environment. They want to know how soft the target is and whether there is armed security on site. They find somewhere else to do their deed if there is. Places like Silver Rail Elementary, a gun-free zone. . . .
But Twin Falls, Idaho and Bend, Oregon, aren’t alone in good guys with guns stopping the bad ones. In fact, it’s more common than you might think.
Readers might want to know: How often do civilians use guns to help stop shooters who pose ongoing threats to multiple people? (By “civilian,” I mean here someone other than a police officer or a security guard; off-duty military members qualify for my purposes.)
Obviously, an exact count is hard to gather, and some cases will be ambiguous. Sometimes, it may not be clear whether the shooter was planning to keep attacking. Sometimes, it may not be clear, at least from press accounts, whether the defender succeeded in stopping the shooter (for instance, by scaring the shooter away). Sometimes a civilian and a security guard or a police officer might step in together. And sometimes news accounts may err. Any count is thus a judgment call, and also likely incomplete because not all incidents make the news.
Still, thanks to a Crime Prevention Research Center spreadsheet, I can say that in 2025 there appeared to have been at least a dozen such incidents. The CPRC report says there were 23; I went through the list, checked the linked news accounts, and tried to exclude ones that seemed just like one-on-one self-defense situations or matters where the defender seemed clearly unsuccessful. (One-on-one self-defense is of course worthy on its own, but it’s not what I’m discussing here.) With those exclusions, and trying to be relatively conservative in what I counted, I ended up counting 12 to 14 such incidents in 2025, depending on how you evaluate some of the more ambiguous ones.
Nor does 2025 appear to be unusual. According to the CPRC report, there were roughly the same number of incidents (or in some years, even more) in 2020-2024 as in 2025. I expect that conservative counts for those years would likewise be comparable to my count for 2025.
Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) responded to the attack by calling for more so-called “common-sense gun laws,” insisting that additional legislation was the best way to prevent similar tragedies.
Yet the shooting occurred in a school district that had already adopted restrictions against armed school employees. According to Crime Prevention Research Center founder Dr. John Lott, 25 of Oregon’s 197 school districts prohibit staff from carrying firearms, and the attack occurred in one of those districts. . . .
Wyden should have done some homework before circulating that statement. According to author and researcher Dr. John Lott, founder of the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), “Only 25 of the 197 school districts in Oregon ban staff from carrying guns, and the attack occurred in one of those 25 school districts. The CPRC hired McLaughlin & Associates completed a survey in August that showed voters by a 51.4% to 35.7% margin support armed teachers, parents with children in K-12 support by an even larger 57.3% to 30.2% margin.” . . .
In the same way that a small number of persistent offenders have an oversized impact on violent crime, specific locations are also heavily overrepresented on crime maps. Research by Dr. John Lott’s Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) shows that murders, and gun murders specifically, tend to be “extremely concentrated” within certain counties. Those counties, unsurprisingly, tend to reflect the soft-on-crime, anti-gun politics that prevail in the Democrat Party.
The CPRC’s July 26 paper, Murders in US Remain Very Concentrated in 2024, with the Murders in Worst 2% of Counties Remaining at their 2020 Peaks, examined the geography of murders overall and finds that generally, there are three types of counties in America. Most have no murders at all; a smaller set has a few murders, and then there is “a tiny set of counties where murders are very common:”
The worst 1% of counties (the worst 31 counties) have 20% of the population and 41% of the murders. The worst 2% of counties (63 counties) contain 30% of the population and 54% of the murders. The worst 5% of counties contain 46% of the population and account for 71% of murders. But even within those counties, the murders are very heavily concentrated in small areas within those counties. By contrast, 53% of the counties have zero murders and another 16% have just one murder. These 69% of the counties account for only 3% of all murders in the country.
This concentration of murders by specific areas also tends to hold true over time and despite changes in the county’s share of the population. The most dangerous 5% of the counties accounted for 71% of the murders in 2010, which varied between 69% and 73% in the intervening years and settled back at 71% by 2024. A similar pattern occurred in the worst 1% of counties over time.
In research described in an article this month, the CPRC also determined that the worst 2% of U.S. counties were responsible for an even greater share of firearm murders than murders overall, accounting for 53% of all murders but 57% of firearm murders in 2025. The “worst 2% to 5% of counties account for a share of firearm murders about four percentage points larger than their share of all murders,” and the worst one percent of counties tallied up an astonishing 43% of all gun-related murders. (On the flip side, 78% of counties recorded zero or only one firearm-related murder last year.) . . .
Armed citizens stop far more “active shooter incidents” than official federal data reports, a crime prevention group said.
A report by Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) president John Lott on Oct. 26 shows armed citizens stopped a third of all “active shooter incidents” from 2014 through 2025, Breitbart News Second Amendment reporter AWR Hawkins noted.
Lott presented the CPRC data as a correction to FBI reports which claim armed citizens only stopped 3.9 percent of the incidents.
While serving in the Department of Justice during President Donald Trump’s first term, Lott said his duties “included evaluating the FBI’s active-shooter reports.” In so doing, he “discovered that the reports omitted or misclassified numerous cases in which armed civilians stopped attacks.”
Lott noted the FBI identified 418 “active shooter incidents” from 2014 through 2025 and credited armed citizens with stopping only 16 of them.
CPRC, on the other hand, “identified 615 active-shooter incidents from 2014 through 2025 and found that armed citizens stopped 225 of them.”
Lott added: “We excluded another 35 cases in which law-abiding armed citizens stopped attackers before they could fire a shot.”
Lott released the CPRC data following legacy media’s coverage of the armed father who stopped the Oct. 15, 2026, Silver Rail Elementary School attack. He pointed to an Associated Press report on the incident which began, “Few mass shootings in the U.S. end like the deadly attack on an Oregon elementary school: with an armed civilian opening fire on the gunman.”
The AP gets information on “active shooter incidents” from the same database the FBI uses.
Dr. John R. Lott, Jr., founder and president of CPRC, explains that “the AP bases its claim on data from the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training (ALERRT) Center, which the FBI uses for its active-shooting reports. But the story ignores detailed challenges to those data that have appeared in such places as The Washington Post, The Washington Times, and RealClearInvestigations.”
As Lott has said on the NRA’s The Armed Citizen Podcast, the “FBI defines an active shooter as someone actively killing or attempting to kill people in a populated, public area. An incident can qualify even if a gunman fires at just one person and misses. The category includes mass public shootings, but the FBI generally excludes shootings connected to other crimes, such as robberies or fights over drug turf.
“I encountered problems with these data firsthand. Until January 2021, I served as senior adviser for research and statistics in the Justice Department’s Office of Justice Programs, where my responsibilities included evaluating the FBI’s active-shooter reports. I discovered that the reports omitted or misclassified numerous cases in which armed civilians stopped attacks.”
Lott found that from 2014 through 2025, the FBI identified 408 active-shooter incidents, but that they credited armed citizens with stopping only 16 (about 4 percent). The CPRC, meanwhile, found many additional cases and publishes a constantly updated list on CrimeResearch.org.
“Our research tells a dramatically different story,” said Lott. “We identified 615 active-shooter incidents from 2014 through 2025 and found that armed citizens stopped 225 of them. We excluded another 35 cases in which law-abiding armed citizens stopped attackers before they could fire a shot. By our count, armed citizens stopped 36.6% of the active-shooter incidents identified over those 12 years, nearly 10 times the FBI’s 3.9%. Over the most recent five years, that figure rose to 42.5%.”
Lott also pointed out that this percentage rises even more if so-called gun-free zones—places where law-abiding citizens are forbidden from carrying concealed—are removed from the count. “Outside gun-free zones, we estimate that armed civilians stopped 56.3% of active-shooter attacks over the past five years,” said Lott.
In 2024, journalist John Stossel asked the FBI about this data. The FBI acknowledged that its data is “not intended to explore all active shooting incidents but rather to provide a baseline understanding.”
Really? But then why has the FBI chosen not to add this qualification to its reports and press releases on the topic?
Assembling this data, no doubt, takes time, and definitions need to be established in order for it to be comprehensible; however, Lott notes that many of the missed incidents are those that include armed citizens. For the public to have informed opinions, and for legislators to have the opportunity to write good policy, Americans need a true and clear understanding of the armed citizens’ role in society.
As President Donald Trump said at the White House after Giamanco risked his own life to save others: “It’s a terrible thing, but thank goodness for a man that had a gun and knew how to use it.”
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