Federal agencies continue to underreport the efficacy of armed civilians in stopping active shooters. Whoever controls crime data can shape the political debate. The Trump administration has reversed some changes the Biden administration made to federal crime and gun data, including information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. But politicization of data at the FBI and Justice Department still deserves attention.
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.
Armed civilians stopped 52.9% of active-shooter attacks over the past 12 years.
Even the most dramatic defensive gun uses rarely get national news coverage. One rare example was in August when Jordan Salinas shot at a gunman outside an In-N-Out fast-food restaurant in Twin Falls, Idaho. As noted by Twin Falls County Sheriff Jack Johnson, “the death toll would have undoubtedly been higher without the quick-thinking actions of Salinas and the off-duty cop.”
Just since the beginning of 2025, there have been 15 such defensive gun uses where police made similar statements about armed civilians saving lives.
The CDC recently restored information on defensive gun use that it removed from its website in 2022 after private pressure from gun-control advocates. Until May 2022, the CDC cited a 2013 National Academies of Sciences report it co-sponsored. The report reviewed studies with widely varying estimates of defensive gun use, citing an estimate of 108,000 annual uses but noting that “108,000 is difficult to interpret because respondents were not asked specifically about defensive gun use.”
The report stated national survey estimates ranged from about 500,000 to more than 3 million defensive gun uses per year.
Mark Bryant, founder of the Gun Violence Archive, was among gun-control advocates who criticized how gun-rights advocates cited these numbers to “stop [gun control] legislation.”
The CDC has restored its link to the National Academies report but misleadingly states it shows defensive gun use at only 60,000 to 2.5 million annually — a figure that does not reflect what the report itself says, as national surveys specifically asking about defensive gun use estimate between 500,000 and over 3 million per year.
The FBI has also demonstrated how badly federal data undercounts defensive gun uses. The FBI defines an active shooter as “one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area.” This category includes attacks where a gunman fires at a single person and misses but generally excludes shootings connected to other criminal activity, such as robberies or drug turf disputes.
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. During that time, I discovered the FBI had missed or misidentified numerous cases where armed civilians stopped active shooters.
Unfortunately, the problem persists. The newest report released on July 30 shows the FBI reports armed citizens stopped only 16 of 408 active-shooter incidents from 2014 through 2025 and just two of 34 cases in 2025.
The Crime Prevention Research Center has identified many additional cases missed or misclassified by the FBI. Our data tells a dramatically different story: from 2014 through 2025, we identified 615 active-shooter incidents and found armed citizens stopped 225 of them. We further excluded 35 cases where a law-abiding armed citizen stopped the attacker before firing.
This means armed citizens stopped 36.6% of incidents over those 12 years, rising to 42.5% in the most recent five years — a rate about 10 times higher than the FBI’s figure of roughly 4%.
The difference is even larger when examining only locations where law-abiding citizens can legally carry firearms. In such areas, armed civilians stopped 52.9% of active-shooter attacks over the past 12 years and 58.3% in 2025.
The FBI has missed so many defensive gun uses that it is hard to believe these omissions are accidental — particularly because the agency has failed to correct mistakes previously brought to its attention.
Fortunately, anyone can examine the cases through the Crime Prevention Research Center’s list of incidents and underlying sources.
