FBI Distorted Data to Minimize Numbers of Armed Civilians Intercepting Shooters

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is known to be a good chef when it comes to cooking the books. Want to guess who they are serving when they make a pie of gun shooting numbers, customizing it with choice placement of figures representing good guys with guns?

Last weekend (August 24), Just the News published a story about the analysis of data on incidents involving active shooters in the country from 2014 to 2024. The analysis was done by the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) and presented in a report put together in June this year. The key finding of the center’s analysis was the understatement by the FBI of cases where armed civilians used guns to stop active shooters.

In plain language, the FBI lied to the public by distorting the actual numbers of good guys with guns that saved lives by taking out or intercepting the criminals with guns during shootings.

The details of the CPRC report show that the FBI counted only 14 cases of armed civilians stopping active shooters in the 10 years from 2014 to 2024. But CPRC found out 561 such incidents – a massive disparity in the count.

CPRC, the watchdog on crime stats, also revealed how the FBI played the data to minimize the numbers of good guys with guns stopping shooters. As reported in the analysis:

According to the CPRC, the FBI’s data is off, in part, because in some cases civilians who intervened were listed as “security guards,” even when they were private citizens. The group also found that armed bystanders who thwarted attacks were not counted if the suspects fled.

In addition, the FBI used other labels like “domestic disputes” and “retaliation murders” to exclude entire incidents from the count of active shooter cases, thus reducing the numbers of armed civilian interceptions of shooters.

The FBI’s perceived motive in such data twisting is obviously to further the leftist anti-gun narrative that denies the benefit of gun ownership by downplaying its value in public safety. The FBI’s data is cited by the anti-gun leftist media as evidence of this position, as the CPRC noted:

While the FBI includes cases where civilians stop active shooters, the news media frequently relies on the limited number of these cases to argue that such interventions are rare.

John R. Lott, the president of CPRC, wrote an op-ed for The Federalist earlier this year, titled “Trump’s FBI Reforms Need To Include Ending Its Data Distortions On Crime” (February 14, 2025). Lott, a former Department of Justice (DOJ) advisor, pointed at the implication of such data distortion by the FBI in his article – controlling the political debate over gun ownership. He wrote that the problem of data distortion goes beyond the FBI:

The FBI isn’t the only agency that hides or distorts data. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) under the Biden administration suppressed data proving that armed citizens help prevent crime by removing its estimates of defensive gun uses from its website.

The CPRC analysis of the real numbers of good guys with guns stopping crimes and saving lives validates the conservative skepticism of information coming from federal agencies. It makes sense to carefully check out the whole recipe and cooking details of the pie called “Facts” before taking a bite.

The post FBI Distorted Data to Minimize Numbers of Armed Civilians Intercepting Shooters appeared first on The Punching Bag Post.