FBI data downplays how often armed civilians stop mass shooters, report shows

The FBI has vastly undercounted cases of armed civilians thwarting mass shootings in the U.S. in its public crime data, according to new research.

Civilians with guns stopped at least 36% of active shooters from 2014 to 2024 despite the FBI recording the figure as 3.7%, the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) said in a report released Friday. Legacy media and fact-checkers previously used the FBI’s data to drive the narrative that such cases are rare, minimizing the public benefits of legal gun access.

FBI Data Undercounts Armed Civilians Stopping Would-Be Mass Shooters, Report Finds by Hudson Crozier

Armed civilians stopped at least 47.8% — nearly half — of reported active shooters in the U.S. in 2024, whereas the FBI recorded zero, the CPRC found, citing local news coverage for each case. Most of these incidents were overlooked by the FBI, while others were misclassified, the group reported. Some included cases in which civilians with firearms caused would-be active shooters to flee the scene, but the FBI only credited law enforcement for stopping the suspects because police later arrested them, according to the research, which was first reported by Just the News.

In one June 2024 case the CPRC noted, two men were involved in an altercation at an apartment complex in Martinsburg, West Virginia, in which shots were fired, but a woman came out of her room with a handgun and fired shots back at them, prompting the men to leave and likely preventing further violence, police said.

Another incident the FBI excluded occurred in March 2024, when a man reportedly opened fire on a group of men on a road in Thomasville, North Carolina, before others returned fire and killed him, preventing further deaths.

The CPRC noted that the cases it highlighted are not comprehensive because the news media likely did not cover every active shooter incident in the country since 2014.

The FBI did not respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller News Foundation. The bureau previously addressed the undercounting issue by saying that its numbers are “not intended to explore all … active shooter incidents” but to give “a baseline understanding.”

“Law-abiding citizens stopping these attacks are not rare,” the CPRC wrote. “What is rare is national news coverage of those incidents.”

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