Estimates vary quite a bit, but the consensus appears to be that hundreds of thousands, probably millions, of crimes are prevented each year by the presence of an armed citizen. In many of those cases, the citizen doesn't fire a shot; sometimes the presence or even the mention of a sidearm is enough to deter a would-be attacker.
A recent piece by Dr. John Lott Jr. at Real Clear Investigations now reveals that the FBI has been undercounting this statistic by a factor of three - and continues to do so today.
Three years ago, RealClearInvestigations reported that the FBI was undercounting the number of armed civilians who had thwarted active shooters by a factor of three.
Even though the FBI acknowledged the issue at the time, it never corrected the error involving the politically fraught issue. In the years since, the problem has only gotten worse. Since RCI’s 2022 article, the FBI has acknowledged just three additional incidents of armed good Samaritans stopping active shooters from 2022 to 2024, and none in the last two years. In contrast, the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), which I head, has documented 78 such cases over that same period – a 26-fold difference.
There are certainly more than that. Some sources put the number as high as 2.5 million cases per year, in which a crime is prevented in one way or another by an armed citizen. With the increased liberalization of concealed-carry laws, and the fact that now over half of the states in the United States have "constitutional carry" laws - any adult who can legally possess a sidearm can carry it legally, concealed - we can expect this number to increase.
But this isn't the only problem Dr. Lott has uncovered. Many jurisdictions, including many with remarkably high crime rates, are resisting the FBI's calls for crime data.
The discrepancy highlights systemic problems in the nation’s record-keeping regarding the politically potent issue of crime and safety. The refusal of many local jurisdictions, including Chicago, Maricopa County, Arizona, and New Orleans, to provide accurate crime data to the FBI has long made comparisons with many cities unreliable. The ongoing Justice Department investigation into whether Washington D.C. police falsified crime rates to create a “false illusion of safety” may provide more evidence to distrust the numbers that local authorities submit.
The FBI has the ability to set the record straight in at least some cases, providing a clearer view of remedies to crime. But its unwillingness to correct errors – or its efforts to fix them on the sly, as RCI reported last year – and improve its methodology raises more concerns. Its shortcomings regarding armed citizens thwarting active shooters illuminate many of these problems.
This is something that FBI Director Patel should have his people looking into.
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Crime is a serious issue, and dealing with crime is one of the (few) legitimate roles of government - to protect the liberty and property of the people. That requires a scrupulous analysis of data when making policy decisions. In this case, knowing precisely how the liberalized concealed-carry laws are affecting crime rates, especially the prevention of violent crimes and mass shootings, would be of vast importance.
Why, then, is the FBI not correcting its data systems? Why are some of these jurisdictions resisting the reporting of their crime statistics?
We can only assume it is because of one thing: The obvious conclusion that guns, as Dr. Lott has pointed out many times, prevent crimes if they are in the hands of law-abiding citizens. That doesn't fit the agenda of the left, who run many of the jurisdictions in question. It doesn't fit the agenda of the entrenched, pre-Patel FBI, many of whose members are still in place.
That last item, that's something Director Patel can fix. The cities that are refusing to report crime statistics? That, sadly, is an issue for the voters of those cities.
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