A new analysis from the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) finds that armed citizens stopped more than a third of active shooter incidents nationwide between 2014 and 2025 — a figure dramatically higher than the one reported by the FBI.
CPRC president John Lott, who previously worked in the Department of Justice during President Trump’s first term evaluating the FBI’s active-shooter reports, says the bureau’s numbers leave out or mislabel cases where armed civilians intervened to stop an attacker.
According to Lott, the FBI identified 418 active shooter incidents from 2014 through 2025 and credited armed citizens with stopping only 16 of them, or 3.9 percent. CPRC’s own review identified 615 active-shooter incidents over the same period and found that armed citizens stopped 225 of them — 36.6 percent.
Lott’s report also notes that CPRC excluded another 35 cases in which armed citizens stopped an attacker before a shot was ever fired, meaning the true total of interventions could be even higher than the 225 figure already counted.
Lott said he was prompted to release the data in response to media coverage of the October 15, 2026, attack at Silver Rail Elementary School in Oregon, where an armed father opened fire on the gunman and stopped the attack. He singled out an Associated Press report on the incident that opened by describing such outcomes as rare, stating: “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.”
Lott notes that the AP draws its active-shooter data from the same FBI database that his report says significantly undercounts civilian interventions.
The CPRC report amounts to a direct challenge to how federal data on mass-shooting outcomes is compiled and reported, with implications for the national debate over armed self-defense and gun policy.
