by WorldTribune Staff, September 6, 2024 Contract With Our Readers
A 2013 National Academies of Sciences report noted that people used guns to stop crime in the United States anywhere from about 64,000 to 3 million times a year.
If you would believe the major media, that has somehow magically stopped.
In 2022, the story that 22-year-old Elisjsha Dicken stopped a mass public shooting in Indiana using his legally carried concealed handgun did make legacy media headlines.
But it was used as an unusual instance.
Related: Georgia school shooter was stopped, apprehended by armed School Resource Officer, September 5, 2024
The Associated Press claimed: “Rare in US for an active shooter to be stopped by bystander.”
The Washington Post declared: “Rampage in Indiana a rare instance of armed civilian ending mass shooting.”
Time Magazine in an article on the Uvalde shooting, argued that local law enforcement’s controversial response proves that “good guys with guns keep failing to stop mass shootings.”
So, is that the case? Have good guys with guns suddenly stopped saving the day as they had thousands or even millions of times in previous years?
Not likely.
What has happened is political pressure from the gun control lobby has led to the suppression of good guys with guns statistics, according to a Sept. 4 report by The Federalist.
During the Biden-Harris administration, the CDC “has sought to suppress data proving that armed citizens help prevent crime by removing its estimates of defensive gun uses from its website,” John R. Lott Jr., head of the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), wrote for The Federalist.
The CDC’s decision was made after gun control activist Mark Bryant, founder of the Gun Violence Archive, lobbied to remove “misinformation” regarding defensive gun use estimates because of they are cited by “gun rights folks” to stop gun control legislation, the report said.
In compiling its data on good guys with guns stopping shootings, the FBI hired researchers at Texas State University. Those researchers, Lott noted, “relied on Google searches to find news stories about these incidents. As such, the FBI’s evidence relies on a dataset that is actively hostile to the truth.”
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Using the obviously skewed Google search results, the FBI reported that armed citizens stopped only 14 of the 350 active shooter cases that it identified from 2014 to 2023.
The CPRC, Lott noted, “has found many more missed cases and is keeping an updated list.”
Out of 515 active shooter incidents from 2014 to 2023, armed citizens stopped 180, the CPRC reported. Those numbers excluded 27 cases where a law-abiding citizen with a gun stopped an attacker before he could fire a shot.
Overall, the CPRC estimates that law-abiding citizens with guns have stopped over 35 percent of active shootings over the last decade and 39.6 percent in the last five years. This figure is eight times higher than the four percent estimate made by the FBI.
In places where law-abiding citizens are allowed to carry firearms, the CPRC estimates that armed civilians stopped 51 percent of active shootings over the past decade. Over the last five years, that figure was 53.1 percent.
Lott concluded: “The FBI dataset is missing so many defensive gun uses that it’s hard to believe it isn’t intentional and the fact that they never correct mistakes that are brought to their attention is even more damning. All the while, the news media unquestioningly reports the FBI’s numbers, actively distorting the truth regarding the pivotal rule responsible gun owners have played in preventing crime and limiting casualties during mass public shootings.”
Report: CDC, FBI suppressed data on number of shootings stopped by good guys with guns added by Editor Two on
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