ACTIVE SHOOTERS: FBI Caught Cooking Books On Good Citizen Involvement Stats

Is there anything the FBI DIDN'T lie to us about?

Wes Walker August 26, 2025
0 143 3 minutes read

It was bad enough that the federal government has buried old studies showing crimes that were foiled by a gun owner, but fudging number to make gun owners look bad? That’s using the FBI to whitewash leftist activism.

For years, established news sources have been citing FBI numbers to ‘debunk’ conservative claims that armed law abiding citizens played a big role in crime prevention — like we see in this story from The Hill.

The truth is good guys with guns are not effective at stopping mass shootings. But when that narrative has become the overwhelming belief among many Americans, we end up with an overabundance of guns, a false belief that they will keep us safe and record-breaking numbers of mass shootings every year.
Data from the FBI demonstrates that only 4.4 percent of active shooters are stopped by a “good guy” with a gun, yet we’ve let the idea that “more guns mean less crime” take hold of our country. — The Hill, Nov 2023

In order to make his claim that lawful gun owners are NOT helpful in stopping gun crime, the author uses FBI data to push his personal view, and therefore, the left’s preferred remedy to gun crime.

But like ANY appeal to authority, that argument is only as useful ad the credibility of the numbers. And those numbers, however official they might sound, have been called out as manufactured by a watchdog group.

The Crime Prevention Research Center has done some research of its own and is challenging the FBI’s official numbers as severely undercounting the role of armed citizens in putting an end to incidents involving an active shooter. The text at the beginning of a looong list of specific incidents is as follows.

The list of active shooting cases that were averted by people legally carrying guns, and were missed in the FBI Active Shooting reports. The FBI’s definition of active shootings is narrow: it involves cases where a gun is fired in public and not part of some other crime like a gang fight over drug turf or a robbery. It includes cases from one person being shot at and missed to a mass public shooting. Our original write-up on this problem is available here. Our research comparing concealed carry permit holders and police in stopping active shooting attacks is available here. Specifically, all the cases where just mass public shootings were stopped are available here.

The following list is broken into several sections, each of which includes a list of entries with the location name (including a hyperlink to a news story about the incident), the date, and a brief description of the incident itself.

1) Likely mass public shootings averted by armed citizens
2) Suspect with a gun fired first
3) Suspect with a gun, the victim shot first
4) Suspect with a gun, but didn’t shoot (not included in our list)

Note the honesty in the 4th entry which does not meet the criteria of being defined as a active shooting incident.

Here is a random sampling of some events included on the list, from various parts of the country:

  • A man entered the store with a gun and got into some sort of argument with a couple of employees. Then he allegedly pulled out a gun and started firing shots. One of the employees grabbed his own gun, and shots were exchanged between the two.
  • A suspect from out of state was walking in the area when he approached a driver who had pulled over on the side of the road to adjust something on his trailer. The suspect then attempted to attack the driver, leaving the driver shot in the process while two witnesses saw what was happening and tried to help. The suspect attacked the witnesses, and one of the witnesses shot the suspect after giving him warnings to stop the assault.
  • Footage shows that a passerby was walking down the street with his friend when the suspect appeared to exchange words with him. When the passerby continued walking away, the suspect pulled out a Glock .45 pistol with a blue laser sight and fired into the man’s turned back. The passerby’s friend, who has a permit to carry a concealed weapon, fired back, hitting the suspect multiple times.
  • The suspect was walking with a woman and baby when he began attacking her. A group of good Samaritans intervened to help the woman being assaulted and the suspect left the area. A short time later, the suspect came back in a vehicle and opened fire on the group, hitting a man and an innocent woman. That’s when someone in the group shot back at the suspect.

Between this story and evidence of cooking the books on crime stats, ‘official’ government stats are getting to be almost as sketchy as Wikipedia.