The Crime Prevention Research Center says federal statistics substantially undercount armed civilians who intervene in active-shooter incidents, reporting 225 armed-citizen stops among 615 incidents it identified from 2014 through 2025.
By yourNEWS Media Newsroom.
A new analysis is challenging federal statistics on defensive gun use, with the Crime Prevention Research Center arguing that armed civilians stopped more than one-third of the active-shooter incidents it identified over a 12-year period — nearly 10 times the rate obtained from the FBI cases the organization reviewed.
The dispute centers on how active-shooter incidents and civilian interventions are identified, classified and counted, and comes as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has restored information about defensive gun use that disappeared from its website in 2022.
Gun-control organizations have long disputed arguments surrounding the “good guy with a gun” and have challenged estimates frequently cited by gun-rights advocates about how often firearms are used defensively.
The Crime Prevention Research Center, or CPRC, says its review of incidents from 2014 through 2025 produced a substantially different picture from federal active-shooter reports.
According to CPRC President John R. Lott Jr., the organization identified 615 incidents meeting the FBI’s active-shooter definition during that period and found 225 in which armed citizens stopped the attacker. CPRC excluded another 35 cases in which an armed civilian intervened before the prospective attacker fired a shot.
The resulting figure was 36.6%.
During the most recent five-year period, CPRC calculated the rate at 42.5%. When examining only locations where civilians could legally carry firearms, it reported that armed citizens stopped 52.9% of attacks during the 12-year period and 58.3% during 2025. Those figures are CPRC’s findings and depend on its own identification and classification of incidents.
CPRC has published an updated list of the individual cases and their underlying sources so its classifications can be compared with the federal reports.
Lott argues the disparity results principally from cases the FBI did not include and a smaller number he says were misclassified.
The FBI defines an active shooter as one or more people actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area. The FBI series generally excludes incidents tied to other criminal activity, including robberies and gang-related violence.
Its latest active-shooter report, released July 30, identified 34 active-shooter incidents during 2025, up from 24 the previous year. The FBI said civilians intervened in seven of the 34 incidents. Four involved civilians disarming or restraining shooters, while weapons were used in three interventions; two of those involved personal firearms and one involved a vehicle.
Using the FBI’s reports for 2014 through 2025, CPRC calculates that armed citizens stopped 16 of 408 incidents, or approximately 3.9%, compared with CPRC’s 225 of 615, or 36.6%.
Lott, who previously served as a senior adviser for research and statistics in the Justice Department’s Office of Justice Programs, said part of his government work involved evaluating FBI active-shooter reports. He said he identified omissions while at DOJ and maintains that the problem has continued.
“The FBI has missed so many defensive gun uses that I find it hard to believe these omissions are simply accidental – particularly because the agency has failed to correct mistakes I previously brought to its attention,” Lott wrote.
The FBI describes its active-shooter reports as tools intended to improve understanding, prevention and response to such attacks. Its July report said law enforcement, security personnel and civilians all played roles in ending or attempting to end incidents in 2025.
Recent cases illustrate why the disagreement has consequences for how defensive interventions are portrayed.
In August, Jordan Salinas fired at a gunman who was shooting at vehicles outside an In-N-Out restaurant in Twin Falls, Idaho. According to a report on the incident, Twin Falls County Sheriff Jack Johnson credited both Salinas and an off-duty officer with limiting casualties.
“The death toll would have undoubtedly been higher without the quick-thinking actions of Salinas and the off-duty cop,” Johnson said.
CPRC says it has documented 15 defensive-gun incidents since the beginning of 2025 in which authorities made similar statements about civilians potentially preventing additional casualties.
The active-shooter dispute is separate from the much broader question of how frequently Americans use firearms defensively in all circumstances — a question researchers have struggled to measure for decades.
The CDC currently defines defensive gun use as using a firearm to protect oneself, family members, other people or property from crime or victimization. Its firearm violence page says estimates vary according to methodology and cites a range of 60,000 to 2.5 million defensive gun uses annually from a 2013 National Academies report.
That National Academies of Sciences report, commissioned in part by the CDC, illustrates why a single estimate remains difficult to establish.
The report said “almost all national survey estimates” available to its authors ranged from approximately 500,000 to more than 3 million defensive gun uses annually. It also discussed a much lower estimate of 108,000 based on the National Crime Victimization Survey, noting that the figure was “difficult to interpret because respondents were not asked specifically about defensive gun use.”
Elsewhere in the same discussion, the report noted NCVS estimates of approximately 60,000 to 120,000 defensive uses annually and another body of research estimating as many as 2.5 million.
The enormous spread reflects different definitions, survey methods and assumptions, and the National Academies described the variation as an unresolved controversy.
Lott argues the CDC’s current 60,000-to-2.5-million summary does not fully convey the report’s discussion because the National Academies also explicitly described national survey estimates ranging from roughly 500,000 to more than 3 million.
The lower end of the debate is also complicated by differences in what weapons are included. Research examining some estimates, including work focused specifically on defensive handgun use, does not necessarily measure every defensive use of every type of firearm.
The CDC’s treatment of the subject has itself become politically contentious.
The agency previously included numerical defensive-gun-use estimates on its website but removed them in 2022. Emails later obtained through public-records requests showed that gun-control advocates had privately urged CDC officials to change the presentation.
Mark Bryant, founder of the Gun Violence Archive, was among those who challenged the high-end estimates. In emails concerning the CDC’s treatment of the data, Bryant argued that the figures were being repeatedly invoked in legislative debates.
He asked that an estimate he regarded as an unsupported outlier “that has been used so often to stop [gun-control] legislation be removed until a panel can build a fair survey which will better reflect the true status of the number of DGUs.”
Bryant separately said his objective was to ensure the CDC published information he considered accurate and verifiable, not to eliminate discussion of defensive gun use. Reporting on the correspondence showed that advocates disputed the reliability of the highest estimates and that CDC officials subsequently changed the webpage.
The CDC has since restored a numerical range and its reference to the National Academies research, while emphasizing that defensive-gun-use estimates vary substantially based on study design.
That uncertainty makes the active-shooter figures a narrower but still contentious part of the larger debate.
CPRC says its review uses the same basic active-shooter definition employed by the FBI, but identifies incidents through a broader search of news reports and other underlying sources.
The organization maintains that many qualifying cases never entered the FBI series. In its latest review, CPRC said it found six cases it considered misclassified and more than 150 additional active-shooter incidents it believes the FBI omitted, including dozens in which armed civilians intervened.
The difference in denominators is therefore central to the dispute: CPRC is not simply calculating a different percentage from the FBI’s 408 cases. It argues that the federal series itself is incomplete and expands the universe to 615 incidents.
That methodological disagreement explains how the two sets of figures can produce such sharply different results.
The FBI reported 34 active-shooter incidents in 2025 and emphasized a broader range of civilian interventions, including unarmed actions. CPRC, by contrast, is specifically attempting to quantify incidents in which law-abiding armed citizens stopped attackers and maintains a case-by-case database supporting its tally.
The result is a dispute not merely over percentages but over which incidents belong in the dataset in the first place.
According to CPRC’s count, armed citizens stopped 36.6% of the 615 active-shooter incidents it identified between 2014 and 2025. According to CPRC’s compilation of the FBI series, the comparable federal figure is 16 of 408, or 3.9%.
Those competing numbers now sit at the center of a broader argument over how government agencies measure defensive firearm use — and how those measurements influence the continuing national debate over gun policy.
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