The state of gun research is abysmal. I've written about it extensively, and there aren't a lot of people whose research actually approaches anything close to accuracy. Of course, those names are often anathema to academia. One of those is John Lott.
Lott has made a career out of debunking the anti-gun establishment's so-called research, but he's never limited it there. He's also taken issue with the research provided by the federal government, regardless of who is in control.
It's something I deeply respect about the man.
And he's got something you need to know about stopping active shooters.
For years, Americans have been told that armed citizens rarely stop active shooters. The FBI’s own statistics have helped reinforce that narrative, with federal reports crediting armed civilians with stopping fewer than 4% of active-shooter incidents. But research from the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) paints a dramatically different picture.
According to the CPRC’s latest research, armed citizens stopped 36.6% of identified active-shooter incidents between 2014 and 2025, nearly ten times the percentage reflected in FBI reporting. The discrepancy raises serious questions about the federal government’s accounting of defensive gun use and the media’s reliance on those statistics.
In an October 23 article published by National Review, CPRC President Dr. John Lott challenged the FBI’s numbers and the resulting portrayal of armed civilian intervention as an exceptionally rare occurrence.
FBI Statistics Tell a Very Different Story
Between 2014 and 2025, the FBI identified 408 active-shooter incidents nationwide. Of those, the bureau credited armed citizens with stopping just 16 attacks, representing 3.9% of the total.
The CPRC conducted its own examination of incidents during the same period, identifying 615 active-shooter attacks, 225 of which were stopped by armed civilians. That produces a rate of 36.6%. During the most recent five years, the CPRC found that the percentage increased to 42.5%.
The organization also identified another 35 incidents in which armed citizens stopped attackers before they fired a shot. Those encounters were excluded from the calculations because the attacks never progressed to an actual shooting.
Now, there are those who will make the claim that with enough gun control there'd have never been mass killings in the first place, but that's kind of idiotic to argue. It's possible some of them were just brandishing attempts that got stopped by armed citizens, but I seriously doubt it. Plus, "There's no evidence they'd have-" is nonsense because we can apply that to literally anything. One could argue that the armed citizens stopped no one because there's no reason to believe that the person who just killed 30 people would have killed a 31st (purely hypothetical, obviously, but you get the point).
The NRA gets lambasted for saying that the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun, but they shouldn't get heat for it because it happens to be true. The trick is to get a good guy with a gun there as fast as possible. This year, we've seen two high-profile shootings end when good guys with guns got involved. From Twin Falls, Idaho, to Bend, Oregon, good people with firearms engaged with the aggressors and ended the threat.
There are numerous cases like this, though, that don't make the same headlines because the body count never gets high enough to warrant our attention.
According to Lott, the FBI has misclassified several of these shootings, but the bigger issue is that the agency is simply missing many of these incidents. CRPC says the FBI "missed 51 incidents identified by CPRC where what would likely have been a mass public shooting was thwarted by armed civilians. There were another 156 active shooting incidents that they missed."
That's one of the problems with the FBI's methodology. It artificially excludes a lot of armed citizen incidents simply because it never got bad enough for inclusion, rather than understanding that the armed citizen's intervention is why it never got bad enough.
Don't let them try to convince you otherwise.