A new analysis by Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) president John Lott contends that legally armed citizens have played a far more significant role in stopping active shooters than federal authorities and the legacy media have acknowledged.
According to Breitbart News, Lotts report concludes that armed citizens intervened in roughly one-third of all active shooter incidents between 2014 and 2025, a stark contrast to the FBIs claim that such interventions account for only 3.9 percent of cases. Lott presented the CPRC findings as a direct correction to the FBIs narrative, arguing that the bureaus reports substantially understate the defensive use of firearms by ordinary Americans.
He explained that while serving in the Department of Justice during President Trumps first term, his responsibilities included evaluating the FBIs active-shooter reports. In the course of that work, he discovered that the reports omitted or misclassified numerous cases in which armed civilians stopped attacks.
The FBI, Lott observed, identified 418 active shooter incidents from 2014 through 2025 and credited armed citizens with stopping only 16 of them. CPRC researchers, by contrast, identified 615 active-shooter incidents from 2014 through 2025 and found that armed citizens stopped 225 of them.
Moreover, Lott wrote, We excluded another 35 cases in which law-abiding armed citizens stopped attackers before they could fire a shot. Those additional cases, he suggested, underscore how often responsible gun owners quietly prevent bloodshed without receiving national attention or official recognition.
Lott said the immediate catalyst for publicizing the new data was media coverage of the armed father who halted the October 15, 2026, Silver Rail Elementary School attack in Oregon. He highlighted an Associated Press account that opened with the line, Few mass shootings in the U.S. end like the deadly attack on an Oregon elementary school: with an armed civilian opening fire on the gunman.
The AP, Lott noted, relies on the same active shooter incidents database used by the FBI, meaning any systemic undercounting of armed citizen interventions is replicated across much of the establishment press. For gun-rights advocates, the CPRCs findings reinforce a long-standing conservative argument: that law-abiding citizens exercising their Second Amendment rights are often the last line of defense when government fails to protect innocent lives.
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