IT'S OFFICIAL: Good Guys With Guns Save a Whole Lotta Lives

More than one-third of "active shooter situations" in recent years were stopped by good guys with guns, according to a new study by the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) — completely blowing away the FBI's official stats.

CPRC founder and former president John Lott wrote on Friday for NRO that his organization "identified 615 active-shooter incidents from 2014 through 2025 and found that armed citizens stopped 225 of them."

That's 36.6% for those keeping score at home, or better than one in three.

I'll have more on the FBI angle further down, but this being The Year of Our Bot-Lords 2026, there simply must be an AI angle —so here it is from the CPRC's September report:

While we don’t in anyway rely on AI to create our list, since some put a weight on their abilities, we asked Grok 4.5 and ChatGPT to spot-check the cases we identified to determine whether the FBI should have included them on its active shooter list. Grok finds that our list of missing cases meet the FBI definition of active shooting cases and should have been included.

Lott's NRO piece came across my desk courtesy of Breitbart's AWR Hawkins, who added that Lott's "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."

Coverage? NPR, for example, tried to bury that part of the story by insisting — against the evidence meticulously gathered by Lott — "how rarely an armed civilian ends an attack like this."

But get this. Lott said the CPRC "excluded another 35 cases in which law-abiding armed citizens stopped attackers before they could fire a shot." So if anything, even those rabid, right-wing gun nuts were perhaps too conservative in establishing how many of these deadly attacks were stopped by an armed citizen.

"The Strange Case of the Gun That Didn't Fire," if this were a Sherlock Holmes adventure.

Good news aside, we have a couple of problems here.

The first is that Lott noted, "From 2014 through 2025, the FBI identified 408 active-shooter incidents but credited armed citizens with stopping only 16 — just 3.9 percent."

In other words, the nation's premier federal law enforcement agency undercounted good-guy-with-a-gun situations by 90%.

That's the FBI under Barack Obama, Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and the first year of Trump's second administration. Clearly, it matters little — at all? — whether a pro- or anti-gun rights president occupies the Oval Office. Regardless, the FBI's [clears throat pointedly] questionable methodology remains unchanged.

The second is that even Lott's 36.6% figure brings to mind a famous movie quote that launched a thousand memes: "Gotta pump those numbers up. Those are rookie numbers in this racket."

Honestly, the odds of any particular armed citizen needing to intervene in an active-shooter situation are vanishingly small. But as we've seen time and time again, these mass killers (and even just the would-be killers) prefer soft targets. So if we want to take that vanishingly small statistic and reduce it to almost nothing, the secret — and it's really no secret — is to eliminate soft targets like "gun-free zones," and make it easier for law-abiding citizens to carry.

We might be headed in that direction already, because as Lott also noted, "Over the most recent five years, that figure rose to 42.5 percent."

Since it's nearly impossible these days to institutionalize dangerously crazy people — hell, in blue cities, we can barely imprison dangerously crazy multiple felons — the next best options are to eliminate their temptations and raise their stakes.

If Lott's figures are correct, we've already gone some good distance in that direction.