By Dave Workman
An updated report on the effectiveness of armed citizen intervention in reducing the number of victims in active shooter incidents has quickly drawn criticism from people to whom Newsweek refers as “gun control experts.”
The study, which may be read here, was done by Dr. John R. Lott, founder and CEO and Carlisle E. Moody at the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC). Spanning 38 pages, including notes, the Lott/Moody report explains, “Since 2000, the FBI has tracked active shooting cases, defined as an event where one or more individuals attempt to kill people in a public place, excluding shootings tied to robberies, gang violence, or other crimes. An active shooting could be as simple as a single shot fired at a lone human target, even if the shooter misses, to a mass shooting with many casualties.
“Yet,” the report continues, “while this data has been collected by the FBI, there have been no studies by the FBI nor academics that systematically examined these data or police performance in stopping these attacks. In this paper, we compare police with the alternative: civilians who have permitted concealed handguns.”
CPRC released the updated report with this explanation: “The FBI tracks active shooting cases—where individuals attempt to kill people in public places, excluding those tied to robberies or gang violence. This study is the first to systematically compare how uniformed police and civilians with concealed handgun permits perform in stopping these attacks. We find that civilians with permits reduce the number of victims killed, the number wounded, and the total number of casualties more than responding police officers do.”
But according to Newsweek, Devin Hughes, founder and president of GVPedia, a “gun violence research organization,” has called the report a “fraud.”
Newsweek also quotes Professor Daniel Webster with the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions, asserting that the study uses “flawed data” to support its findings.
TGM reached out to Lott for comment, and he provided us with information he sent to Newsweek over the weekend. Here are some excerpts:
“If you read our paper or actually read the FBI active shooter reports, you know that despite Hughes’ claims to the contrary, the FBI definition excluded “gang violence,” “drug related violence,” and “shootings in relation to another criminal act.” The FBI defines active shooter incidents as those in which an individual actively kills or attempts to kill people in a populated, public area. But it does not include those it deems related to other criminal activity, such as a robbery or fighting over drug turf. Over the period from 2014 to 2024, the FBI includes 14 cases where a legally armed civilian used a gun to stop an active shooting attack. We think that the number is 199. We thought it was useful to fill in the rest of these cases using the exact same definition that excluded “gang violence,” “drug related violence,” and “shootings in relation to another criminal act” to see how police and civilians compared in dealing with these attacks.
“You uncritically cite The New Yorker article by Michael Spies, who is an employee of Michael Bloomberg’s The Trace, and it is my understanding he (spent) a year investigating me for the piece…If Newsweek wants to cite an employee working for a Michael Bloomberg gun control group as an objective source, that is your choice, but it still might be useful for your readers to at least know who his paying his salary.
“As to Dan Webster’s comment, 92% of mass public shootings occur in places where guns are banned, and we have pointed out how time after time these mass public shooters explicitly explain why they are drawn to these gun-free zones. I don’t know how people can read these diaries and manifestos and not be struck by the explicit planning to target those cites. In any case, the point of the research was to see whether Webster is correct that armed citizens in places that they are allowed to carry is helpful in stopping these attacks. I note he doesn’t address our point that officers in uniform have real tactical disadvantages in stopping attacks. Attackers who see an officer present in a place they are planning to attack can either wait for the officer to leave the area, move on to another target themselves, or kill the officer. Webster can assert that we are wrong, but to my knowledge our paper is the very first one to actually empirically study that issue.”
In their report, Lott and Moody take a swipe at how the media covers active shooter incidents.
“Researchers,” they observe, “are increasingly relying on newspaper articles to create data sets, such as those compiled by the Gun Violence Archive, to study gun control. But these studies consistently overlook a key question: Do news articles reflect reality? The media’s tendency to focus on dramatic incidents ties directly to the old journalism adage, “If it bleeds, it leads.” For example, the media disproportionately cover defensive gun uses when the attacker is killed or wounded versus cases when a gun is simply brandished (Lott, 2021b).
“Despite the well-known bias in news coverage,” they add, “academic studies ignore how selective reporting distorts our understanding of gun violence. We address this issue of potential selection bias by comparing how the media covers civilian and police interventions in active shooter incidents. We start by assuming that when legally armed civilians and police face similarly violent situations—such as the same number of victims killed during an active shooting—the media will report both types of cases. To test that assumption, we analyze potential systematic biases in how the media covers the cases where civilians versus police stop active shootings.”
While the Newsweek report notes that Lott/Moody used data from “cities in nearly all states for the years 2014-2024,” it points to a significant difference in the number of active shooting cases during those years. The FBI reported 350 such shooting cases, but Lott/Moody said there were 562 cases, identified by “utilizing Nexis searches and defensive gun use cases from the Heritage Foundation, Defensive Gun Use Tracker, Gun Violence Archive, the American Rifleman and Reddit that met the FBI’s definition of an active shooting.”
Interestingly, in their report, the researchers note, “We rely on the work done at the U.S. Department of Justice to fill in these missing cases for civilians who stopped attacks, but the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) has filled in the missing data for many more of these cases from 2014 through 2024. The FBI claims that there were 350 active shooting cases over those years, but our data show that there were 562 – the difference almost completely involving additional active shooting incidents stopped by civilians.”
Eight pages into their updated report, Lott and Moody state, “Assuming our count is complete, armed citizens have stopped more active shooter incidents than the police have. Also, armed citizens do not appear to interfere with the police or blunder so badly as to get their weapon taken away by the shooter or kill the wrong person. In a later section we test the hypothesis that innocent bystanders are equally likely to be shot by an armed citizen as by a police officer. Finally, armed citizens have stopped 58 active shooter events which, according to the police, were likely to have escalated into mass public shootings.”
Two pages later, they discuss another important consideration, the reluctance of armed citizens to actually take action.
“There are a number of possible reasons for this behavior,” the report explains. “For example, the first response for armed citizens who are accompanied by small children or others, is to get their wards to safety. Also, some armed citizens might not feel confident enough in their shooting skills to take on the shooter, others might feel outgunned or simply freeze. The result is that these cases are stopped by police. We do not know how many police cases could have been stopped by armed citizens who chose not to respond.”
Gun control proponents have been attacking Lott’s research for decades, while he has garnered significant support from the firearms community, which considers his work as groundbreaking, and providing a balance to what gun owners consider biased research against gun ownership.
Even Newsweek acknowledged, “A 2022 article in The New Yorker stated that “Lott’s findings and methods have generated scathing criticism from prominent academics, who have questioned his veracity and exposed flaws in his work. But the critiques have not diminished his stature. Instead, they have fed the conspiracy-oriented mentality of the gun-rights movement. In the eyes of its adherents, and in the messaging of the gun lobby and trade groups, attempts to discredit Lott are really attempts to suppress the truth.”
Lott and the CPRC have gotten used to criticism, and the research continues.
