FBI Says Defensive Gun Use Is Rare – Data Analyst Says They’re Ignoring the Truth

John Stossel opens his recent video with a simple challenge: if defensive gun use is so rare, why do so many real incidents go uncounted?

He’s not pitching a movie plot. He’s interrogating the numbers the public is told to trust.

Stossel’s latest report features criminal justice researcher John Lott, who argues the FBI’s counts understate how often everyday people stop violent offenders.

Their core claim isn’t that guns solve everything. It’s that the official scorekeeping misses a lot of saves – and that misshapes policy and culture alike.

The Hollywood Narrative vs. Street Reality

Stossel starts where pop culture lives.

On TV, the civilian who draws a pistol is a clown, a menace, or both. The “good guy with a gun” is mocked as a fantasy. That attitude bleeds into commentary from pundits and politicians who insist civilian intervention is “statistically unrealistic,” as Stossel notes.

But that’s not what Stossel’s team – and Lott – see when they comb through raw incidents.

Security footage and local news tell a quieter story. A clerk produces a handgun; a robber flees. A homeowner presents a pistol; three intruders trip over themselves getting out. No triumphant soundtrack. No lecturing detective. Just a defensive tool changing a criminal’s calculation in a second.

Lott’s point, cited by Stossel, is pragmatic: when criminals have to assume a target might be armed, crime goes down. Often, he says, the mere presence of a weapon ends the threat without a shot.

That’s not an adolescent fantasy. It’s behavioral economics.

The FBI’s “Baseline” – And Its Blind Spots

So why do official reports say defensive gun uses (DGUs) are rare?

Stossel’s answer is as much about methodology as ideology. He quotes the FBI’s own description: its active shooter reports aim to provide “a baseline understanding,” not an exhaustive tally of all incidents.

That baseline, Lott argues, leaves out crucial episodes – especially those stopped by citizens before they turn into national tragedies. If an attacker is downed quickly, if deaths are few, and if the story never goes national, it’s more likely to be missed.

Stossel gives examples Lott has cataloged at CrimeResearch.org. After the Pulse nightclub massacre dominated headlines, a similar nightclub attack in South Carolina ended fast when a concealed carrier intervened. 

The would-be killer still had more than a hundred rounds, Lott notes, but the citizen’s gun ended the rampage early.

That case barely registered beyond local coverage.

Stossel highlights another: a man opened fire at a packed park next to a Florida elementary school. A bystander with a lawful concealed carry permit wounded the attacker and stopped the assault. The local police publicly praised the civilian’s actions. Yet, Stossel says, the FBI’s report didn’t capture it.

If your counting rules consistently exclude quick stops and small casualty counts, you’ll teach the country a strange lesson: only the failures exist.

What “Missed” Defensive Gun Uses Look Like

To make the abstraction concrete, Stossel interviews Raul Mendez.

Mendez was at a neighborhood party when a guest began shooting. One round smashed through Mendez’s face and destroyed his left eye. Somehow, he regained consciousness, drew his concealed handgun, and fired four times, ending the attack.

Mendez believes he saved his pregnant wife, his daughters, and many friends. Police statements echoed that judgment.

And yet, Stossel reports, the FBI had no record of his case in its counts. Mendez’s takeaway is blunt: “They’re not recording the true numbers. You know, guns actually save.”

That single anecdote can’t settle a national argument. But Stossel and Lott’s larger point is about the selection process. The more quickly a defender ends an attack, the less likely it is to be counted or widely reported. The incentives of news – and the FBI’s limited scope – lean toward the worst outcomes. The everyday saves vanish.

Data Disputes, Definitions, And Incentives

To his credit, Stossel notes that Lott’s research has critics. Social science fights are messy, and the particulars (survey methods, weighting, replication) matter a lot.

But you don’t need to referee every academic skirmish to grasp the asymmetry he’s describing.

Fatal, high-casualty shootings become national events. Non-fatal, low-casualty incidents – especially those halted by citizens – often don’t. 

They may land on a local station’s website and die there. If your dataset depends on national aggregation and official classification, you’ll miss the quieter half of the curve.

Lott says he’s even encountered open political resistance when pushing to correct entries – something he attributes to “people at the top” being more ideological than rank-and-file agents. 

That’s his characterization, not a proven fact, but it fits the broader dynamic: in highly politicized spaces, ambiguous data points don’t get the benefit of the doubt.

The FBI’s own reply to Stossel is revealing in its restraint. These reports are a “baseline,” the Bureau says. Fair enough. But baseline is not reality. Baseline is the part of reality a particular instrument can see.

When policymakers and media use that partial view as the whole truth, error becomes doctrine.

Policy Stakes: What Counts Gets Funded

Here’s where the counting problem bites.

If the public believes civilian intervention is vanishingly rare or mostly disastrous, lawmakers are rewarded for constraining it. If they understand that credible civilian defense ends attacks quickly – often before they reach national-scale carnage – those lawmakers face a different tradeoff.

Stossel quotes Lott’s broader international claim: places that ban guns or handguns see murder rates rise because they mostly disarm victims, not predators. That’s a controversial assertion in academic circles, and it deserves scrutiny case by case.

Even so, the narrow American question stands on its own. We’re not debating a hypothetical universe with zero guns; we’re debating rules in a country with hundreds of millions of them. In that world, the relevant question isn’t “guns or no guns?” It’s “who reliably has them when seconds count?”

If the answer is “only criminals and the occasional on-scene cop,” you get one set of outcomes. If the answer is “criminals know a bystander might shoot back,” you get another.

Stossel’s reporting argues the second world exists more often than the FBI’s “baseline” suggests.

Culture, Coverage, And The Stories We Reward

Stossel also exposes a cultural feedback loop.

Advocacy groups brag about working with writers’ rooms to shape gun portrayals. That’s their right. But when the default storyline is “armed citizen makes things worse,” it primes audiences – jurors, editors, legislators – to see civilian defense as reckless outlier behavior.

Meanwhile, stories like Mendez’s get little oxygen.

You don’t have to love guns to see the bias. We celebrate tragedy at national scale and starve near-misses of attention. Then we point to the relative scarcity of heroic narratives as evidence they don’t exist.

It’s not that the media never tell the “good guy with a gun” story. They do. But there’s no denying which type of story trends, which gets a presidential statement, and which becomes a policy rallying cry.

Numbers follow attention. Attention follows drama. Lives saved early are, by definition, less dramatic.

Count The Quiet Saves

Two things can be true at once.

First, defensive gun use isn’t magic. Training, judgment, and context matter. No one should pretend that a pistol in a waistband turns chaos into order. Bad shots and bad decisions exist.

Second, the way we count – and the way we tell stories – has consequences. If a civilian stops an attack at three victims instead of thirty, that is not “less real.” It is the outcome we claim to want.

Stossel and Lott aren’t asking anyone to suspend skepticism. They’re asking for fuller accounting and fewer convenient blind spots. If the FBI’s own caveat is that its report is only a baseline, then media and policymakers should stop treating it like a ceiling on reality.

Count the quiet saves. Learn from them. Teach them. And then write policy for the world we actually live in, not just the one that makes the evening news.

Stossel’s report doesn’t say guns are a cure-all. It says a lot of lives are saved by ordinary people who refuse to be victims – and that those saves often vanish from the official record.

John Lott’s catalog of missed cases can be debated. But dismissing the underlying pattern because the loudest tragedies drown out the quiet wins is a mistake.

If you care about truth – and good policy – you have to measure what you can’t easily see.

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