Anti-Gunners Distort Evidence on Defensive Firearms Uses

A 2023 Pew Research Center poll on gun ownership and public safety in America indicated that the overwhelming majority of Democrat and Democratic-leaning adults (86%) felt the nation’s gun laws should be even more strict. The same poll asked whether gun ownership did more to increase public safety by allowing law-abiding citizens to protect themselves, or tended to reduce safety by giving too many people access to firearms and increasing misuse. More than three out of four Democrats/Democratic leaners (78%) responded that gun ownership did more to decrease safety. According to this viewpoint, there are no “good guys with guns” – everyday gun owners are more likely to be seen as irresponsible, unsafe, or even Second Amendment-obsessed extremists.

To maintain this perception and rationalize laws that make it harder for responsible citizens to acquire and carry firearms for self-defense, the anti-gun lobby and their political allies have resorted to downplaying or distorting the evidence on how often armed, law-abiding citizens reduce or prevent crimes.

A recent op-ed by Dr. John Lott, Jr., the president of the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) discusses how the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have been hiding data that support the deterrent effect of “good guys with guns.”  

For almost a decade, the CDC had “referenced a 2013 National Academies of Sciences report noting that people used guns to stop crime anywhere from about 64,000 to 3 million times a year.” This changed under the Biden-Harris Administration, due to pressure from gun control groups. Dr. Lott states that “gun control activist Mark Bryant, founder of the Gun Violence Archive, lobbied the CDC to remove ‘misinformation’ regarding defensive gun use estimates because they are cited by ‘gun rights folks’ to stop gun control legislation.”

Another source, the California Rifle and Pistol Association (CRPA), writes about how it had filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request with the CDC in 2022, after its attorney noticed the same amendments on the CDC website. It determined that the changes were the result of a “one-sided lobbying campaign by gun control advocates who were angry that the DGU [defensive gun use] figures reported were hurting gun control efforts.” As part of the campaign, “[i]ntroductions from the White House and Senator Dick Durbin’s (D., Ill.) office helped the advocates reach top officials at the agency after their initial attempt to reach out went unanswered.” According to the CRPA, the CDC “made no effort to contact any other researchers, nor did they contact any gun rights advocates to get their input before the change was made.” Additional details on the CDC’s cooperation with the anti-gun lobby are found in an article by the internet publication, The Reload (here, and referenced here).

A December 2022 letter written by five senators to the-then director of the CDC, Biden appointee Dr. Rochelle Walensky, raised the issue of gun-control activist influence over the CDC’s research. It quotes an email from Mark Bryant on the DGU statistic (“[T]hat 2.5 Million number needs to be killed, buried, dug up, killed again and buried again.”) in the context of the mission of the CDC. While the “CDC prides itself on being a ‘science-based, data driven service that protects the public’s health,’” the “censorship action” taken by the CDC ran contrary to that mission. “Eliminating a credible study and its findings hurts public health, and the credibility of the CDC, by not allowing transparent access to all relevant research. The removal of the referenced study was not due to updated research. Instead, based on the released emails from the FOIA request, the removal of this study appears only to have been done to appease gun control groups and to suppress any data that firearms are in fact an essential lifesaving and protection tool.”

As Dr. Lott discovered, the FBI has also been selective about presenting defensive gun use data, in the context of how it tracks “active shooter incidents” (ASIs). Dr. Lott previously worked with the U.S. Department of Justice, and his duties included evaluating the FBI’s reports on ASIs. He found that the FBI repeatedly excluded or misidentified cases in which armed citizens intervened in attacks, with the corrected data (as collected by his CPRC) establishing a significantly more favorable depiction of defensive gun uses:

For instance, the FBI continues to report that armed citizens stopped only 14 of the 350 active shooter cases that it identified in the ten years from 2014 to 2023… the CPRC numbers tell a much different story: Out of 515 active shooter incidents from 2014 to 2023, armed citizens stopped 180, saving countless innocent lives. Our numbers even excluded 27 cases where a law-abiding citizen with a gun stopped an attacker before he could fire a shot.

Dr. Lott’s data indicate that armed law-abiding citizens have stopped over 35% of active shootings over the last decade (and 39.6% of those in the last five years), a figure that is “eight times higher than the four percent estimate made by the FBI.” The DGU statistics are even more compelling once the location is narrowed to only those places where citizens are legally allowed to carry a firearm. By excluding “gun-free zones,” 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.”

The FBI is apparently unwilling to amend its dataset, even after corrected and updated information is made available. Dr. Lott indicates that the “FBI refuses to fix its errors and even the blatant omissions that I pointed out have still not been corrected… [it’s] 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.”

The Washington Post’s fact-checker ran up against the same intransigence over this alleged research bias. Last year, when the Post looked into Dr. Lott’s dataset and the FBI’s exclusion of cases, it reported that the “FBI brushed aside repeated efforts by The Fact Checker to discuss its reports and the questions raised by Lott. ‘We have no additional information to provide other than what is provided within the active shooter reports on our website,’ the agency said in an emailed statement.”

In addition to this skewing of facts and data by taxpayer-funded government agencies, there is now reason to believe that the Biden-Harris Administration may have been in “collusion” with anti-Second Amendment plaintiffs in litigation against the gun industry. The suit seeks to hold a gun manufacturer responsible for the harm caused by third-party criminals who illegally modified its product and committed violent crimes. A pending investigation by House Committee on Oversight and Accountability Chairman James Comer (R-Ky.) is examining whether and to what extent the White House has been working with “anti-gun interest groups to cripple a manufacturer who sells a legal product in a highly regulated sales market.”

All of this is aimed at undermining the truth that armed, law-abiding citizens – the “good guys with guns” – thwart crime and save lives. Defensive gun use instances occur across the country every day (here, here, here and here, for instance). “Almost every major study has found that Americans use their firearms in self-defense between 500,000 and 3 million times annually, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has acknowledged,” states the Heritage Foundation. “In 2021, the most comprehensive study ever conducted on the issue concluded that roughly 1.6 million defensive gun uses occur in the United States every year.” Moreover, as Dr. Lott’s research on concealed carry permittees shows, the 21.8 million or so carry permit holders in the United States are, as a group, exceptionally law-abiding.

Protection remains the overwhelming reason Americans exercise their Second Amendment rights. Even Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, trying to close the gap between her radical anti-gun agenda and what millions of Americans believe in, has a newly embraced (and highly questionable) identity as a “gun owner” for her “personal safety.”

Make no mistake: even as she trades on her gun ownership for political mileage, Harris poses a most serious threat to our Second Amendment rights. Her extremist gun control platform makes it clear that she doesn’t like guns or America’s responsible gun owners, and will continue the campaign to write off defensive gun uses and “good guys with guns” as an unsubstantiated fantasy of the firearm lobby.

—Courtesy NRA-ILA