Most active shootings stopped by armed private individuals are likely prevented before they become mass shootings, so they are rarely counted in mass shooting statistics. In many cases, visible armed resistance may deter or redirect an attacker entirely, making such events nearly impossible to measure — a longstanding problem in statistics involving events that never happened.
On July 30, 2024, the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) published a paper showing massive errors in the FBI Active Shooter Reports from 2014 through 2023.
In that time, I have personally been following the issue throughout. The first viral post I wrote about the subject of armed civilians stopping mass murders was published on December 15, 2012. It had 16 incidents documented from October 1997 to 11 December 2012. All of these incidents occurred before the FBI started collecting data on “active shooter” incidents.
The CPRC paper, with a solid institution and organization behind it, does a better job than a single blogger did at the end of 2012.
The Crime Prevention Research Center report claims the FBI’s active shooter reports from 2014 through 2023 badly undercount armed citizens who stopped attacks. According to the CPRC, the FBI listed only 14 active shooter incidents stopped by defensive gun use during that period, while the CPRC found 180 such cases.
By Dean Weingarten
