For years, gun control activists have sought to “debunk” the so called” good guy with a gun myth” in an effort to pass more stringent controls on one of our nation’s most cherished liberties. The federal government and legacy media have worked together to reduce the compelling evidence that armed, law-abiding citizens are one of the best at deterrents against common mass casualty attacks in support of this agenda.
For example, in 2022, 22-year-old Elisjsha Dicken stopped a large public killing using his officially carried concealed weapon. The incident turned out to be an unexpected instance in which the national press covered this brave action. But an Associated Press title claimed:” Rare in US for an effective sniper to be stopped by bystander”. However, a Washington Post article declared:  ,” Rampage in Indiana a rare example of military human end large shooting”.
The dreadful school shooting in Uvalde was the subject of a Time Magazine article that year, contending that native law enforcement’s contentious answer shows that” good guys with guns keep failing to stop mass killings.”
In contrast, the Centers for Disease Control ( CDC ) under the Biden Administration has attempted to suppress data showing that armed citizens aid in crime by removing its estimates of defensive gun use from its website. For nearly a decade, the , CDC referenced a 2013 , National Academies of Sciences , statement noting that people used guns to prevent crime , anywhere from about 64, 000 to 3 million times a month.
This decision was taken after gun control advocate Mark Bryant, chairman of the Gun Violence Archive, lobbied the CDC to reduce “misinformation” regarding defense weapons use estimates because of they are cited by “gun rights folks” to prevent gun control legislation. Shortly after, the CDC took down these quotes and then lists no amounts.
The FBI has also demonstrated that it is prone to political stress.  , The , FBI defines an effective sniper attack , as occurring when an individual constantly kills or attempts to kill people in a crowded, public place. A large public shooting is included in this measure, which includes anything from a single person being shot at even if the goal is n’t hit.  , It does n’t include, however, shootings involving other crimes, such as robbery or fighting over drug turf.
To collect its record, the FBI hired experts at Texas State University. Police departments do n’t keep track of these cases, so the researchers relied on Google searches to find information about these incidents. In this way, the FBI relies on a database that is actively hostile to the fact for its evidence.
At the U.S. Department of Justice, I served as the senior consultant for research and data between 2020 and 2021. My career included evaluating the FBI’s effective killing information. During my day with the DOJ, I learned that the FBI frequently overlooked or misidentified cases of residents using weapons to prevent attacks. For example, only 14 of the 350 active sniper cases identified by the FBI between 2014 and 2023 were still being stopped by trained people.
The Crime Prevention Research Center ( CPRC ), which I run, has found many more missed cases and is keeping an , stopped-active-shooter-incidents/?_thumbnail_id=16421″ target=”_blank” rel=”noreferrer noopener”>updated list. As such, the CPRC statistics tell a little different history: Out of 515 active shooter situations from 2014 to 2023, armed people stopped 180, saving many innocent life. Even the most recent instances in which a law-abiding citizen with a gun stopped an attacker before he could fire a shot were excluded.
The CPRC estimates that law-abiding citizens who carry guns have stopped more than 35 percent of active shootings over the past ten years and 39.6 percent over the past five. Eight times more than the FBI’s four-percent estimate, which is true.
After all, you ca n’t ignore law-abiding citizens who will stop attacks in gun-free zones because this figure increases even more when controlling only those areas where citizens are legally allowed to carry a firearm. We think that armed civilians have stopped 51 % of active shootings over the past ten percent of those locations where law-abiding citizens are permitted to carry firearms. Over the last five years, that figure was 53.1 percent.
In Conyers, Georgia in 1999, an active shooter at Heritage High School was disarmed by an assistant principal in one of these cases that the FBI ignored. When I presented this case, among others, to the FBI, a bureau official acknowledged that” the FBI did not come across this incident during its research in 2015, but it does meet the FBI’s active-shooter definition”.
When questioned about their disregard for this and other situations, the bureau official claimed that their reports “are limited in scope.” It’s not surprising that researchers overlook cases or mistakenly identify them. But , the , FBI refuses to fix its errors and even the blatant omissions that I pointed out have still not been corrected.
It’s difficult to believe that the FBI dataset is missing so many defensive gun uses, and the fact that they never correct errors that are brought to their attention is even more damning. The news media unquestionably reveals the FBI’s numbers, actively deframing the truth about the crucial role gun owners have played in preventing crime and limiting casualties during mass public shootings.
