A new analysis from the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) says the FBI has dramatically undercounted how often armed citizens stop active shooters. Where the FBI has long told the public that civilians intervene successfully in just 3.7% of cases from 2014–2024, CPRC argues the true rate is at least 36% – and, when incidents in gun-free zones are excluded, the average rises above 52%, with 2024 hitting 62.5%. CPRC’s president, economist John R. Lott Jr., says the implications are straightforward: law-abiding citizens stop attackers far more often than the official narrative suggests.
What CPRC Says The Data Really Show
In its September 2025 report, CPRC recounted 561 “active shooter” incidents across the 2014–2024 period, compared with the FBI’s 374. Of those 561, CPRC found 202 were stopped by armed citizens. CPRC used the FBI’s own definition of an “active shooter” (people actively killing or trying to kill in a public place, not tied to robberies or gang violence), and posted a case-by-case list with links to local news coverage to allow strangers to audit the work. CPRC also noted 31 additional incidents where an armed citizen stopped an attack before the suspect fired a shot; those weren’t included in its main percentage but underscore how often early civilian intervention ends a threat before it becomes a rampage.
Why The Gap? Two Big Buckets Of Error
CPRC attributes the discrepancy to misclassification and missed cases. On misclassification, the center identified instances where the FBI’s write-ups admitted an armed civilian confronted and halted an attacker, yet the incident wasn’t counted as a “citizen stop” because the suspect later fled and was caught by police – or because a volunteer church safety team member was labeled a “security guard,” transforming a civilian stop into a professional one on paper.
On overlooked incidents, CPRC says the FBI missed dozens of civilian stops and well over a hundred qualifying “active shooter” events that local press did cover. To my eye, even if one argues at the margins, the magnitude of the delta, 14 civilian stops in the FBI’s count versus 202 in CPRC’s, is too large to wave away as definitional dust.
A Case Study In Mislabeling: The Texas Church Shooting
CPRC points to the 2019 West Freeway Church of Christ attack in White Settlement, Texas, where armed parishioner Jack Wilson – who volunteered for the church’s safety team – shot and killed the murderer within seconds. According to CPRC, Wilson told Lott he was not a professional security guard, and that 19–20 congregants were armed that day. Yet the FBI’s accounting placed this under “stopped by security,” not “armed citizen.” It’s a telling example: the facts on the ground look like a classic “good guy with a gun,” but the categorization diminishes civilian credit.
Gun-Free Zones And The Denominator Problem
CPRC’s strongest point may be about where shootings happen. About half of “active shooter” attacks occur in places where lawful carry is prohibited. If you can’t legally carry there, you can’t possibly intervene there – and any statistic that includes those incidents in the denominator guarantees a lower apparent success rate for armed citizens. When CPRC removed those gun-free locations, it found that citizens stopped 178 of 339 attacks – 52.5% over the decade, with several recent years substantially higher. That’s not an argument that carry alone is a cure-all; it is an argument that bans change the environment in which citizens can help.
A Banner Year For Civilian Stops
The year-by-year pattern CPRC presents shows a steady rise in documented civilian stops, culminating in 2024 with 62.5% of eligible incidents halted by armed citizens. CPRC is candid that older cases are harder to find – local coverage disappears, archives go behind paywalls – so earlier years are likely undercounted even in its own files. That transparency matters. Honest measurement is messy, but the trend line CPRC describes is consistent with the wider spread of lawful carry and the grim reality that more Americans have faced active threats.
The Washington Examiner’s Read: Ten Times The FBI Rate
Paul Bedard, writing in the Washington Examiner, called CPRC’s findings a “ten times” correction to the FBI’s headline claim, summarizing the core numbers (36% overall, even higher outside gun-free zones) and pointing to likely causes for the disparity: excluded “no-shots-fired” interventions, misclassification of volunteers as professionals, and a generally restrictive protocol that leans out rather than in. Bedard highlighted Lott’s broader point: the role of armed citizens has been underplayed in public debate, shaping policy assumptions and media narratives in ways that don’t reflect ground truth.
Guns & Gadgets: The Narrative Vs. The Facts
Jared Yanis, host of Guns & Gadgets 2nd Amendment News, put it bluntly for his audience: if CPRC is right, the story America’s been told – armed citizens almost never stop attackers—is false. He walked through the FBI’s 3.7% claim, CPRC’s 36% counter, and what he calls the “five drivers” of undercounting: narrow definitions, misclassification, ignoring no-shot interventions, media blind spots for local stories, and institutional inertia when agencies are told about errors but don’t correct them. You don’t have to accept Yanis’s “the FBI lied” framing to see the core thrust: a lot of lifesaving civilian action isn’t making it into the official ledger.
What The Institutions Say – And Don’t Say
When pressed in prior years about omissions, the FBI has said its reports are meant to provide a “baseline understanding,” not a comprehensive census. The Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center (ALERRT) at Texas State University, which compiles much of the underlying data, has said inclusion doesn’t depend on how an incident ends, though it does exclude shootings tied to domestic disputes or other crimes.
CPRC counters by pointing to several domestic-origin shootings the FBI did include, arguing the standards are applied unevenly – especially when a civilian is the one who ends the threat. My take: none of this is easy work, but when the errors almost exclusively flow in one direction (minimizing civilian effectiveness), criticism is warranted.
Do Armed Civilians Cause More Harm Than Good?
Media skepticism often centers on friendly-fire risk: in the chaos of violence, might an untrained civilian make things worse? CPRC answers with two points. First, it says its dataset shows no cases of armed citizens accidentally shooting bystanders in these interventions, and only one case of police mistakenly shooting the civilian “good guy” (in Colorado in 2021). Second, response time matters.
As Sarasota County Sheriff Kurt Hoffman told CPRC, uniformed officers bear the “shoot me first” problem and simply cannot be everywhere; when seconds count, the people on scene are functionally the first responders. Whether you’re pro- or anti-carry, that’s an uncontroversial reality.
Policy Stakes: Bad Stats Make Bad Law
The most important consequence of this debate isn’t about bragging rights; it’s about policy. If policymakers are told that civilian intervention is vanishingly rare, they’ll be more inclined to double down on gun-free zones and restrict lawful carry around “sensitive places.”
If the reality is that civilians stop a third or half of these attacks where they’re allowed to carry, that should put wind in the sails of policies that expand lawful defensive options, from eliminating gun-free zones to allowing willing staff to carry in schools. Bedard noted a 2013 PoliceOne survey of officers in which 86% believed casualties could be reduced or avoided if permitted citizens carried in schools; those frontline views deserve a seat at the table.
A Call For Transparency – And Competitive Fact-Checking
The truth here shouldn’t be partisan. CPRC has laid down a public, link-by-link dataset and invited anyone – supporters, skeptics, journalists – to pick it apart. The FBI and ALERRT, for their part, should publish their inclusion/exclusion decisions with the same level of granularity and update prior reports when demonstrable misses surface. If the official numbers are right, they’ll stand up to scrutiny; if they’re wrong, the corrections will make the public safer by improving our shared understanding of what actually works when evil walks in the door.
An Underreported And Underappreciated Fact
CPRC, the Washington Examiner’s Paul Bedard, and Guns & Gadgets host Jared Yanis are telling versions of the same story: armed citizens are stopping active shooters far more often than the FBI’s headline number suggests, and that fact has been underreported and underappreciated.
Reasonable people can debate methods and definitions; what’s much harder to argue is that 3.7% captures the lived reality reflected in hundreds of local-news accounts. If we care about saving lives – and we should – then the data we use to make policy needs to be as complete and candid as we can make it. On this issue, CPRC just moved that conversation a long way toward the truth.
Gary’s love for adventure and preparedness stems from his background as a former Army medic. Having served in remote locations around the world, he knows the importance of being ready for any situation, whether in the wilderness or urban environments. Gary’s practical medical expertise blends with his passion for outdoor survival, making him an expert in both emergency medical care and rugged, off-the-grid living. He writes to equip readers with the skills needed to stay safe and resilient in any scenario.
