In its summary of recent findings about how often legally armed bystanders actually intervene to end mass shootings, John Lott’s Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) was far too forgiving of the FBI for massively and deliberately lying. Based on its research going back to 2014, the CPRC noted that the FBI’s manipulated numbers indicate that just over four percent of mass shootings were ended by an armed bystander.
The CPRC, on the other hand, reveals that number to be almost six out of ten, a massive difference reflecting the agency’s part in the decades-long war against private ownership of firearms.
The CPRC said the FBI “misclassified” many of those mass shootings while “overlooking” others in order to present a slanted, anti-gun perspective to the national media seeking the same end. And there were many others that the agency missed counting altogether.
Said the CPRC softly, “Some see a pattern of distortion in the FBI numbers because the errors almost exclusively go one way: minimizing the life-saving actions of armed citizens.”
For example, the mainstream media, relying totally on FBI statistics to present their anti-gun bias, scorned the idea that the actions of the hero in the Greenwood Mall mass shooting in July, Elisjsha Dicken, represented any kind of pattern. The AP said that it is “rare in [the United States] for an active shooting to be stopped by a bystander.” The New York Times echoed: “After [the] Indiana mall shooting, one hero is no lasting solution to gun violence.”
And said The Washington Post: “The Greenwood incident is unique … because it became one of the rare instances of an armed citizen successfully intervening to end a mass shooting.”
Just how rare? According to lies fed by the FBI to the willing sycophants in the media, there were 252 “active shooter incidents” between 2014 and 2021, and just 11 of them were “stopped by an armed citizen.” That’s 4.4 percent.
But the CPRC counted 360 active shooter incidents in that same time period and found that an armed citizen stopped 124 of them. That’s 34 percent.
And when mass shooting incidents occur in places where concealed carry laws are effective, the percentage of “stops” jumps to 58 percent. It only makes sense that in “gun-free” zones bystanders are typically unarmed and thus unable to defend themselves or others from an active shooter.
Further, noted the CPRC, even it doesn’t count incidents involving just one person being targeted, of which there no doubt are many.
And many more shootings are ended before they begin merely by the presence of an armed bystander.
For years the CPRC has brought these massive “discrepancies” to the attention of the bureau, and for years the bureau has ignored them or made no attempt to correct their slanted statistics. Said the CPRC, “The FBI failed to address them.”
Happily, others who see how the FBI distorts its data aren’t so reticent about calling out the agency. Gary Mauser, professor emeritus at Simon Fraser University in Canada, said:
Whether deliberately through bias or just incompetence, the FBI database of active shooters cannot be trusted….
Relying on media stories would greatly underestimate the true number of defensive gun uses.
The CPRC agrees: “There is no reason to think that the news media covers all the cases where civilians stopped attacks.”
Where the CPRC failed to call out the FBI directly for fudging its data, however, Theo Wold, former DOJ assistant attorney general during the Trump administration, was much more forthright:
So much of our public understanding of this issue is malformed by this single agency. When the Bureau gets it so systematically — and persistently — wrong, the cascading effect is incredibly deleterious. The FBI exerts considerable influence over state and local law enforcement and policymakers at all levels of government.
