The last few years have been fantastic for gun rights, and this year has been no exception. However, a couple of instances that prove us correct aren't anything I can term as "fantastic." I can't because we're talking about two mass shootings being stopped by armed citizens.
Good guys with guns stop bad guys with guns. The secret is to have as many good guys with guns around so that hopefully, they'll be around when needed.
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.
What happens in a lot of cases is that the good guy with a gun stops the bad guy before he racks up any kind of body count, such as what happened in White Settlement, TX, when a bad guy armed with a shotgun stood up during a church service and started shooting. A volunteer security guard dropped the bad guy with a masterful shot to the noggin, turning out the lights before he could even cause enough damage for the Gun Violence Archive to call it a mass shooting.
But it would have been, and we all know why it wasn't. We know because of the video of the shooting that went public and viral, which is likely the only reason we know about it.
Greenwood Park Mall got that dubious distinction after three people were killed before the good guy with a gun could put a stop to it, much like Bend and Twin Falls. No shade on any of these brave souls, for the record. This stuff happens fast and luck plays a factor here in being able to stop them sooner.
And now we learn there are somewhere around a dozen more per year that we never hear about. Think about that for a moment.
No, it wouldn't change the debate. Anti-gunners have gotten their talking points from their billionaire-funded masters and are making out like the gun laws in Oregon don't exist, but we know the truth.
Now we know that this isn't some super rare feat that just happened to occur twice this year, but something that happens once a month on average, at the least.
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