A report by Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) president John Lott shows armed citizens stopped a third of all “active shooter incidents” from 2014 through 2025.
Lott then presented the CPRC data as a correction to FBI reports which claim armed citizens only topped 3.9 percent of the incidents.
He noted that during his time in the Department of Justice during President Trump’s first term, his duties “included evaluating the FBI’s active-shooter reports.” In so doing, he “discovered that the reports omitted or misclassified numerous cases in which armed civilians stopped attacks.”
Lott noted the FBI identified 418 “active shooter incidents” from 2014 through 2025 and credited armed citizens with stopping only 16 of them. CPRC, on the other hand, “identified 615 active-shooter incidents from 2014 through 2025 and found that armed citizens stopped 225 of them.”
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Moreover, Lott wrote, “We excluded another 35 cases in which law-abiding armed citizens stopped attackers before they could fire a shot.”
Lott made clear the impetus for releasing this information was the establishment media’s coverage of the armed father who stopped the October 15, 2026, Silver Rail Elementary School attack. He pointed to an AP report on the incident which began, “Few mass shootings in the U.S. end like the deadly attack on an Oregon elementary school: with an armed civilian opening fire on the gunman.”
The AP gets information on “active shooter incidents” from the same database the FBI uses.
AWR Hawkins is an award-winning Second Amendment columnist for Breitbart News and the writer/curator of Down Range with AWR Hawkins, a weekly newsletter focused on all things Second Amendment, also for Breitbart News. He is the political analyst for Armed American Radio and the director of global marketing for Lone Star Hunts. He holds a PhD in Military History with a focus on the Vietnam War (brown water navy), U.S. Navy since Inception, the Civil War, and Early Modern Europe. He enjoys reading Philosophy and novels by Jack Carr and Nelson DeMille. He is a lever action man in an AR-15 world. Follow him on X: @awrhawkins. You can sign up to get Down Range at breitbart.com/downrange. Reach him directly at awrhawkins@breitbart.com.
