Good Guys Save Lives, but the FBI Can’t See Them

U.S.A. – Dr. John Lott issued another stunning report. Dr. Lott at the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) said there were “massive errors” in the FBI’s reports on attempted mass murderers. It also says that armed citizens are amazing, though the FBI seems to have a strong bias against counting attacks that were stopped by ordinary citizens. This is what Lott found.

Dr. Lott went back seven years of data and identified 360 “active shooter incidents”, though he admits he probably missed several more. In that data he found 124 times where an ordinary armed citizen stopped the attacks. Over that same time period, the FBI identified only 252 active shooter incidents, and they could only find 11 examples that were stopped by armed citizens. Those differences are huge. Lott found that “some 34% of the active shooter incidents were stopped by armed citizens, not the 4% cited by the FBl.” This is important because these FBI reports are reprinted as truth in the mainstream media.

In some cases, the FBI classified armed parishioners as church security guards rather than as armed citizens.

In my mind, a security guard is licensed and a paid position. These armed men and women were not paid to attend church services.

Lott admits he excluded another 24 cases because the armed civilians stopped the armed attack before the murderer fired his gun. Isn’t that the best-case outcome?

The media and gun control advocates seem concerned with the worst possible outcomes when civilians defend themselves. Yes, there is always the possibility that a bystander could be injured, but we have yet to see an armed citizen shoot an innocent bystander. In contrast, we know that the police have accidentally shot and killed the armed defender at least once. That’s not something that happens very often because the police usually arrive long after the shooting is over. Either the murderer is usually dead or he was long gone before the police arrive.

A Fox News report recalled the incident earlier this year at the Greenwood Mall in Indiana, where legally-armed 22-year-old Elisjsha Dicken successfully stopped a would-be mass shooter just seconds after the killer opened fire in the mall food court area. At a distance estimated to be 40 yards, Dicken began firing ten rounds of which eight hit the shooter, fatally wounding him. He was hailed as a hero by Greenwood Police Chief James Ison.

What we really want to know is how effective armed defenders are when we exclude “gun free zones” where honest citizens are disarmed by law. The results are amazing.

When they are allowed to go armed, ordinary citizens stopped mass murder 51 percent of the time in the last few years.

That explains why murderers choose gun free zones. It also explains why anti-gun politicians want more gun free-zones. It might explain why the politicized FBI won’t report the data honestly.

This originally appeared on AmmoLand.com.