A new analysis from the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) argues that armed citizens have stopped more active shooter incidents nationwide than federal data acknowledges, a claim its author says is backed by a closer review of cases the FBI left out or miscounted.
CPRC president John Lott says his organization’s research shows armed citizens stopped 36.6 percent of active shooter incidents between 2014 and 2025. That figure stands in sharp contrast to the FBI’s own reporting, which credits armed citizens with stopping just 3.9 percent of such incidents over the same period.
Lott says the discrepancy comes down to which cases get counted. The FBI identified 418 active shooter incidents from 2014 through 2025 and attributed only 16 of them to armed citizens stepping in. CPRC’s review found 615 active shooter incidents over that span, with armed citizens stopping 225 of them — plus another 35 cases where armed citizens stopped an attacker before a shot was ever fired, which CPRC excluded from its main count.
Lott says he first noticed the gap in the FBI’s figures while working at the Department of Justice during President Trump’s first term, when his responsibilities included reviewing the bureau’s active-shooter reports. He says that review turned up numerous cases in which armed civilians who stopped attacks were either omitted from the data or misclassified.
Lott tied the timing of the report’s release to recent national coverage of an incident in Oregon. On October 15, 2026, an armed father stopped an attack at Silver Rail Elementary School by opening fire on the gunman. Lott singled out an Associated Press account of that incident, which opened by noting how rare it is for a mass shooting in the U.S. to end with an armed civilian firing on the attacker. Lott points out that the AP draws its active-shooter data from the same database the FBI uses — the same database his report says undercounts cases like the one in Oregon.
The CPRC report does not change what happened at Silver Rail Elementary School, but it does raise a broader question about how often the federal statistics reflect the full picture of how these incidents actually end.
