The Federal Bureau of Investigation has a lot to answer for, and, no doubt, the current leadership has its work cut out, depoliticizing the country’s supposedly premier law enforcement agency. The latest skeleton to fall out of the closet concerns how the Bureau has been vastly undercounting the number of cases of defensive gun use by armed Americans. The only reason for deliberately doing such a thing would have been orders coming down from Justice Department top brass – or from the White House – to hide the many, many times each year across America that privately owned guns have been used to save lives.
If your agenda is to turn public opinion against gun ownership and spread the fear of gun violence, the last thing you want is people knowing guns can be, and often are, used to deter or prevent crime.
On Aug. 22, the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) published a shocking study detailing “massive errors” in FBI Active Shooting Reports from 2014 to 2024. Considering the volume of evidence of the Bureau acting in accordance with a politically partisan agenda over the course of these very same years, it is not unreasonable to suspect that discrepancies in the FBI data were not innocent errors.
On the other hand, it is perhaps possible for the FBI to claim the wildly inaccurate numbers are those provided by police and sheriff departments and state police around the country. Maybe the errors – or perhaps the deliberate under-reporting – were local issues.
One could speculate that law enforcement departments in Democratic jurisdictions may themselves have decided to disregard known instances of defensive gun use. Democrats, after all, are fond of claiming it is almost unheard of for an armed civilian to save lives. The left-wing media, using FBI data, frequently make the same assertion.
Wildly Inaccurate Defensive Gun Use Data
In summary, between 2014 and 2024, the FBI recorded 374 active shootings and 14 cases of defensive gun use. The CPRC counted 561 active shootings and 202 instances of armed civilian intervention.
The FBI defines an active shooting – not to be confused with a mass shooting – as incidents in which an individual actively kills or attempts to kill people in a populated public area.
Not included are shootings related to gang violence or other criminal activity. So, an active shooting is one whose sole purpose is the shooting – and there need not be any casualties. Any attempt to shoot people in a public area – regardless of outcome – is an active shooting. CPRC used the same definition but even excluded 31 cases in which armed civilians intervened and suspects did not fire their weapons.
Over the whole time period, then – according to the FBI – defensive gun use by civilians occurred in just 3.7% of all active shootings. CPRC puts it at 36%. A massive difference. The Bureau reports say there was not a single incidence of defensive gun use during active shootings in 2019, 2020, 2023, and 2024. By contrast, CPRC found that armed civilians confronted active shooters in almost 30% of cases in 2019, in nearly 38% of 2020 active shootings, in more than 30% of 2023 incidents, and, in 2024, defensive gun use was a factor in 47.8% of active shootings.
CPRC came up with its own numbers by compiling local media reports of defensive gun use incidents. The FBI relies on reports from state and local law enforcement agencies, which are a matter of discretion rather than being mandatory.
Unknown Number of Lives Saved
One must also factor in the number of incidents never reported. Many of them would not fit the definition of active shootings, but still, armed civilians have likely employed firearms to save themselves or others on countless occasions. Around 14 months or so prior to the writing of this article, the author, while driving in the late evening through a small city not known for its crime, was confronted by potential carjackers. Revealing the presence of a handgun was all it took to make the assailants reconsider. No shots were fired, and no police reports were filed.
How many times across a country with 340-plus million residents does that scenario, or something similar, play out?
Then, consider the number of lives potentially saved in every one of these active shootings stopped by an armed member of the public. It is an incalculable figure, obviously. One cannot tally the number of people who could have been shot but weren’t. Over the course of any given year, it could add up to possibly hundreds.
Whether this is part of the deliberate promotion of an anti-gun agenda, bad recordkeeping, or an unfortunate reliance on unreliable law-enforcement data, the FBI has done the general public a disservice. Not only that, it provided ammunition – pun intended – for left-wing anti-gun journalists to write countless articles claiming that defensive handgun use is extremely rare when clearly it is not. The bottom line is that armed citizens frequently save lives or prevent the commission of other crimes. It is also true, when one factors in the previously mentioned unknown number of potential victims protected, that defensive handgun use saves more American lives every year than are taken by armed bad guys.
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