Would The FBI Lie About The Statistics Of How Often Civilians Stop Active Shooters?

 Not only would they lie, they have lied repeatedly.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pv4Lhmpd82Y

A new analysis from the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) says the FBI has dramatically undercounted how often armed citizens stop active shooters. Where the FBI has long told the public that civilians intervene successfully in just 3.7% of cases from 2014–2024, CPRC argues the true rate is at least 36% – and, when incidents in gun-free zones are excluded, the average rises above 52%, with 2024 hitting 62.5%. CPRC’s president, economist John R. Lott Jr., says the implications are straightforward: law-abiding citizens stop attackers far more often than the official narrative suggests.
CPRC, the Washington Examiner’s Paul Bedard, and Guns & Gadgets host Jared Yanis are telling versions of the same story: armed citizens are stopping active shooters far more often than the FBI’s headline number suggests, and that fact has been underreported and under appreciated.
Jared Yanis, host of Guns & Gadgets 2nd Amendment News, put it bluntly for his audience: if CPRC is right, the story America’s been told – armed citizens almost never stop attackers—is false. He walked through the FBI’s 3.7% claim, CPRC’s 36% counter, and what he calls the “five drivers” of undercounting: narrow definitions, misclassification, ignoring no-shot interventions, media blind spots for local stories, and institutional inertia when agencies are told about errors but don’t correct them. You don’t have to accept Yanis’s “the FBI lied” framing to see the core thrust: a lot of lifesaving civilian action isn’t making it into the official ledger.
When pressed in prior years about omissions, the FBI has said its reports are meant to provide a “baseline understanding,” not a comprehensive census. The Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center (ALERRT) at Texas State University, which compiles much of the underlying data, has said inclusion doesn’t depend on how an incident ends, though it does exclude shootings tied to domestic disputes or other crimes.
CPRC counters by pointing to several domestic-origin shootings the FBI did include, arguing the standards are applied unevenly – especially when a civilian is the one who ends the threat. My take: none of this is easy work, but when the errors almost exclusively flow in one direction (minimizing civilian effectiveness), criticism is warranted.
Reasonable people can debate methods and definitions; what’s much harder to argue is that 3.7% captures the lived reality reflected in hundreds of local-news accounts. If we care about saving lives – and we should – then the data we use to make policy needs to be as complete and candid as we can make it. On this issue, CPRC just moved that conversation a long way toward the truth.
The most important consequence of this debate isn’t about bragging rights; it’s about policy. If policymakers are told that civilian intervention is vanishingly rare, they’ll be more inclined to double down on gun-free zones and restrict lawful carry around “sensitive places.”
If the reality is that civilians stop a third or half of these attacks where they’re allowed to carry, that should put wind in the sails of policies that expand lawful defensive options, from eliminating gun-free zones to allowing willing staff to carry in schools. Bedard noted a 2013 PoliceOne survey of officers in which 86% believed casualties could be reduced or avoided if permitted citizens carried in schools; those frontline views deserve a seat at the table.
Media skepticism often centers on friendly-fire risk: in the chaos of violence, might an untrained civilian make things worse? CPRC answers with two points. First, it says its dataset shows no cases of armed citizens accidentally shooting bystanders in these interventions, and only one case of police mistakenly shooting the civilian “good guy” (in Colorado in 2021). Second, response time matters.
As Sarasota County Sheriff Kurt Hoffman told CPRC, uniformed officers bear the “shoot me first” problem and simply cannot be everywhere; when seconds count, the people on scene are functionally the first responders. Whether you’re pro- or anti-carry, that’s an uncontroversial reality.