CRPC Argues FBI Undercounts Defensive Gun Uses

On Saturday, I wrote about a “report” from the Violence Policy Coalition that tried to paint people with concealed carry permits as heartless killers. Most of those, unsurprisingly, were suicides, which has nothing at all to do with concealed carry one way or the other, but they still tried to make people with permits appear dangerous, even though we know these are typically people who commit crimes at a much lower rate than just about any group of people you care to name.

I took apart the so-called report and noted different entities that had defensive gun use statistics that were accumulated via similar means, including the anti-gun Gun Violence Archive, which showed a much higher total for defensive gun uses annually.

And these were terrible numbers, all things considered, because they both relied on news reports to gather data. That’s a problem because a lot of defensive gun uses never make the news.

But the FBI has access to far more data than the media. Yet the Crime Prevention Research Center argues that the FBI still undercounts them, too. 

That’s especially true when it comes to armed citizens stopping mass shootings.

Anew analysis by the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) found that the FBI has understated the number of times armed civilians have stopped active shooter incidents in the United States.

According to the FBI, civilians stopped just 14 out of 374 active shooter cases between 2014 and 2024, which is a rate of 3.7%. 

But the CPRC, a nonprofit data watchdog on crime issues, said it uncovered 561 incidents during the same period, with armed citizens stopping 202 of them, or 36%. CPRC said the percentage jumped to 52.5% when excluding shootings that occurred in “gun-free zones.” 

According to the CPRC, the FBI’s data is off, in part, because in some cases civilians who intervened were listed as “security guards,” even when they were private citizens. The group also found that armed bystanders who thwarted attacks were not counted if the suspects fled.

The FBI had classified the 2019 church shooting in White Settlement, Texas, involving a parishioner who shot and killed the gunman as being thwarted by a security guard, even though the man was not a security professional.

The CPRC also noted that the FBI excluded some cases it labels “domestic disputes” or “retaliation murders” from its data about civilians stopping active shooters.

Of course, the CPRC is right. While the parishioner in White Settlement was acting as church security, it was a volunteer position and wasn’t because he was paid to carry a gun that day. He was able to be armed because of the Texas laws favoring armed citizens, not because he was a licensed security professional exempt from normal rules about carrying a firearm.

And yeah, if they run, the shooting is still stopped.

But let’s also understand that with the FBI’s data, taken at face value, that’s still nearly twice as many incidents where an armed citizen stopped a mass shooting as the VPC claims were carried out by one, and in seven fewer years being examined.

Then, of course, we have the issue of the FBI downplaying the role armed citizens actually serve in preventing and stopping these shootings. If the bad guy runs off because he met armed resistance, that should count as stopping a mass murder. If the armed citizen is in a volunteer capacity and not working in a professional one, he’s an armed citizen, not a “security guard.”

It’s unfortunate, but the truth is that the FBI has long done what it could to downplay the benefits of gun rights in this country. Whether that was from the top or not, the truth is that this needs to change, and it needs to change right away.

Statistics can be used to lie, but they’re also important if we’re going to have a rational debate. We need them to reflect the truth, not what some bureaucrat wants to be true.

Editor’s Note: President Trump has been doing what he can to root out the bureaucrats who assault our Second Amendment rights and right to self-defense.

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