The saying goes "it takes a good guy with a gun to stop a bad guy with a gun." According to the FBI, however, it happens only rarely that a civilian with a concealed carry permit stops an active shooter. According to the FBI crime database, only about 4% of active shooting cases, about 14 out of 302, involves civilians who have a concealed carry permit who are stopping these active shooting attacks.
However, Dr. John Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) took an independent look at the data.
“They simply have missed a lot of cases. I think rather than 14, you're talking about 202, and so rather than 4%, you're talking about 36% or so of these attacks were stopped by civilians,” informs Lott.
According to the CPRC, this is a massive error in active shooting reports from between the years 2014 to 2024. It's an important statistic, because it's a key data point used in a variety of ways.
“It's not just used by the media, it's used in court cases, it's used in academic studies, it's gone and used in legislative debates,” explains Lott.
RealClearInvestigations published an article, written by Lott, titled “Unaccountable: The FBI’s Strange Refusal to Fix Key Crime Stat.” In it, he says that these discrepancies “highlight systemic problems in the nation’s record-keeping regarding the politically potent issue of crime and safety.”
Lott reveals that, even though several sources, including his research, has shown that the FBI statistics are wildly inaccurate, the agency, so far, has refused to correct them.
“It's possible you could just simply be incompetent, but even when academics and others have pointed out that they missed these cases, they haven't gone back and fixed them,” says Lott.
Furthermore, Lott wrote that their unwillingness to correct their mistake or change their methodology raises a clear causes of concern.
His research ended with the 2024 statistics, which was the Biden FBI era. The new FBI director, Kash Patel, and Deputy Director Dan Bongino have made some substantive changes at the agency, but so far, they have not seen or addressed this particular statistic.
“I think the FBI needs to fix the data,” concludes Lott.
