Jordan Salinas was eating at an In-N-Out in Twin Falls, Idaho, last month when a gunman started firing at vehicles outside the restaurant. Salinas grabbed his firearm and shot back. Twin Falls County Sheriff Jack Johnson later said "the death toll would have undoubtedly been higher" without Salinas and an off-duty officer stepping in.
The FBI counted that as one of two armed-citizen stops in 2025. The real number is dramatically higher.
John R. Lott Jr., the economist who served as senior adviser for research and statistics at the Department of Justice's Office of Justice Programs until January 2021, has spent years documenting exactly how far apart federal numbers are from reality. His findings are the kind of thing the CDC would prefer you never saw.
The FBI says armed citizens stopped 16 of the 408 active-shooter incidents it tracked from 2014 through 2025. That's roughly 4%. Lott's Crime Prevention Research Center identified 615 active-shooter incidents in the same period — and found armed civilians stopped 225 of them. That's 36.6%.
Four percent versus 36.6%. One of those numbers belongs in a federal database. The other belongs in a campaign ad for Everytown.
The gap gets wider when you narrow the lens. In locations where civilians can legally carry firearms, armed citizens stopped 52.9% of active-shooter attacks over the past twelve years. In 2025 alone, that number climbed to 58.3%. Over the five-year stretch from 2021 to 2025, the average was 42.5%. The CPRC also documented 35 additional cases where armed citizens stopped attackers before a single shot was fired — cases that don't even make the official count.
Since January 2025, police in 15 separate incidents have publicly stated that armed civilians prevented mass casualties. Fifteen times law enforcement went on the record saying a good guy with a gun made the difference. The CDC's website, until recently, had nothing to say about any of it.
In May 2022, the CDC scrubbed its own references to defensive gun use from its website. The agency had been citing a 2013 National Academies of Sciences report that reviewed studies estimating between 500,000 and more than 3 million defensive gun uses per year. One lowball estimate pegged the number at 108,000 annually, though the researchers themselves called that figure "difficult to interpret."
The data didn't disappear because it was wrong. It disappeared because Mark Bryant, founder of the Gun Violence Archive, complained that gun-rights advocates kept citing those estimates to "stop legislation." The CDC obliged. The numbers went down the memory hole, and so did the link to the National Academies report itself.
A federal health agency deleted peer-reviewed research from its own website because an activist said the facts were inconvenient for his policy goals. That's not science. That's not even politics. That's suppression with a lab coat on.
The Trump administration has since restored the defensive gun use discussion and the National Academies link. Lott's broader concern remains: the FBI's own active-shooter reports consistently miss or misidentify cases where armed civilians intervened, and the agency has failed to correct mistakes he flagged during his time at DOJ. When you're wrong in the same direction every single time, the pattern stops looking like incompetence.
The 4% figure the FBI publishes is the number gun-control groups put in press releases. It's the number that shows up in congressional testimony when someone wants to argue that armed citizens are a myth. It's built on a dataset that excluded more than 200 incidents where a legally armed American stopped a killer.
The CPRC publishes its full case list with individual sources so anyone can check the work. The FBI does not.
When the agency tasked with tracking crime undercounts by a factor of nine, and the agency tasked with public health deletes the research that explains why, the question isn't whether armed citizens save lives. The data already answered that. The question is why two federal agencies spent years making sure you wouldn't find out.