CPRC in the News: New York Post, Yahoo! News, Fox News, Politics & Business Review, PJ Media, and much more
A new study shows that the attitude of Americans toward red flag laws, where guns are taken away from citizens by a judge who determines they are a danger to themselves or others, dramatically changes from support to opposition when more detail is provided in the poll question about the process of gun confiscation via the legal process.
The recently released study of 1,000 likely voters conducted by the Crime Prevention Research Center initially showed that 58% of people support red flag laws when told the “primary purpose is to allow judges to take away a person’s gun based on a single complaint when there is a concern about that individual committing suicide.”
When respondents were told there are no hearings where a defendant presents their case to a judge before their gun rightsare taken away and mental health experts are not involved in the process, the 58% support drops down to 30% with 47% opposing. . . .
Gun rights advocate and economist John Lott, however, argued that creating gun-free zones in cities will leave law-abiding citizens more vulnerable and predicts the courts will strike down the executive order.
“There have been no problems in Philadelphia with concealed handgun permit holders that justifies the mayor’s gun-free zones. In banning guns, the people who will obey the ban are the law-abiding permit holders,” Lott, the president and founder of the Crime Prevention Research Center, told Fox News Digital
“The ban actually serves as a magnet for criminals as they know their victims will be defenseless in those areas. But it is even worse because law-abiding people will now be defenseless going to or from those gun-free zones. Concealed handgun permits have been soaring in Philadelphia because crime is out of control and the city can’t protect people.”
The Philadelphia executive order was motivated by the death of Tiffany Fletcher, a mom of three who was caught in the crosshairs of a gang gun battle. Lott noted that none of the gang members were concealed carry permit holders.
Lott also directed Fox News Digital to an article he wrote in September 2021 detailing armed Americans using guns to stop crimes and even mass shootings often fly under the radar, even though data show they are more common than gun crimes.
“Americans who look only at the daily headlines would be surprised to learn that, according to academic estimates, defensive gun uses — including instances when guns are simply shown to deter a crime — are four to five times more common than gun crimes, and far more frequent than the roughly 20,000 murders or fewer each year, with or without a gun. But even when they prevent mass public shootings, defensive uses rarely get national news coverage,” he wrote for Real Clear Investigations. . . .
Part of Wilmington’s problem lies in its proximity to violent cities such as Philadelphia and Baltimore, the consequences of whose crime policies spill over into the small state, according to John Lott, who is president of the Crime Prevention Research Center.
“Given that Philly is just 30 miles from Wilmington, it is very common for criminals to move between the two cities,” Lott told Fox News Digital. “Soros-backed prosecutors in Philadelphia and Delaware County in Pennsylvania have also been unwilling to prosecute violent criminals, and I am sure that it has had some spillover effect for nearby Delaware, and in particular New Castle County in Delaware.”
Charles Stimson, a policy expert in crime control at the Heritage Foundation and a former violent crimes prosecutor with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C., echoed Lott’s assertion. . . .
“This whole concept that a good guy with a gun will stop the bad guys with a gun, it doesn’t hold up. And the data bears this out, so that theory is over.” An incredible statement. The data does not, in fact, bear out her contention, and she probably knows it.
The Washington Examiner’s Oct 4 piece reported: “In looking over FBI cases between 2014-2021, [John R. Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center] found that some 34% were stopped by armed citizens (124 out of 360), not the 4% cited by the FBI and often used by the media to dismiss the importance of legally armed citizens.” So, just another reason to worry about the FBI – they are vastly undercounting the effectiveness of armed citizens against criminals.
The Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) has released a report that purportedly shows the FBI’s data is riddled with “massive errors” when it comes to counting the number of times armed citizens have stopped shooting incidents.
According to the study, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has seriously underreported the number of times a good guy with a gun has actively stopped a bad guy with one over the last eight years. The report concludes that some undercounting has been “by an order of more than 10.”
“Although collecting such data is fraught with challenges, some see a pattern of distortion in the FBI numbers because the errors almost exclusively go one way, minimizing the life-saving actions of armed citizens,” the report states. Ads by
It shows that 34.4 percent of active shootings were stopped by armed citizens between 2014 and 2021. However, the FBI asserted that only 4.4 percent of active shootings were thwarted by armed citizens during that same time period. That’s a huge discrepancy. . . .
. . . Part of Wilmington’s problem lies in its proximity to violent cities such as Philadelphia and Baltimore, the consequences of whose crime policies spill over into the small state, according to John Lott, who is president of the Crime Prevention Research Center.
“Given that Philly is just 30 miles from Wilmington, it is very common for criminals to move between the two cities,” Lott told Fox News Digital. “Soros-backed prosecutors in Philadelphia and Delaware County in Pennsylvania have also been unwilling to prosecute violent criminals, and I am sure that it has had some spillover effect for nearby Delaware, and in particular New Castle County in Delaware.”
Charles Stimson, a policy expert in crime control at the Heritage Foundation and a former violent crimes prosecutor with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Washington, D.C., echoed Lott’s assertion. . . .
In its summary of recent findings about how often legally armed bystanders actually intervene to end mass shootings, John Lott’s Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) was far too forgiving of the FBI for massively and deliberately lying. Based on its research going back to 2014, the CPRC noted that the FBI’s manipulated numbers indicate that just over four percent of mass shootings were ended by an armed bystander.
The CPRC, on the other hand, reveals that number to be almost six out of ten, a massive difference reflecting the agency’s part in the decades-long war against private ownership of firearms.
The CPRC said the FBI “misclassified” many of those mass shootings while “overlooking” others in order to present a slanted, anti-gun perspective to the national media seeking the same end. And there were many others that the agency missed counting altogether.
Said the CPRC softly, “Some see a pattern of distortion in the FBI numbers because the errors almost exclusively go one way: minimizing the life-saving actions of armed citizens.”
For example, the mainstream media, relying totally on FBI statistics to present their anti-gun bias, scorned the idea that the actions of the hero in the Greenwood Mall mass shooting in July, Elisjsha Dicken, represented any kind of pattern. The AP said that it is “rare in [the United States] for an active shooting to be stopped by a bystander.” The New York Times echoed: “After [the] Indiana mall shooting, one hero is no lasting solution to gun violence.”
And said The Washington Post: “The Greenwood incident is unique … because it became one of the rare instances of an armed citizen successfully intervening to end a mass shooting.”
Just how rare? According to lies fed by the FBI to the willing sycophants in the media, there were 252 “active shooter incidents” between 2014 and 2021, and just 11 of them were “stopped by an armed citizen.” That’s 4.4 percent.
But the CPRC counted 360 active shooter incidents in that same time period and found that an armed citizen stopped 124 of them. That’s 34 percent. . . .
One thing we have traditionally relied on when analyzing trends in violent crime is the FBI’s annual reports covering a variety of crime statistics. But what if those statistics are wildly inaccurate? In at least one category, that appears to have been the case in recent years. A new report from John Lott’s Crime Prevention Research Center demonstrates that the FBI records very few active shooting incidents where armed citizens have stepped up to put an end to the killing. But according to these statistics, it happens far more often than the Bureau’s records claim. How far off was the FBI? During the seven-year period from 2014 through 2021, the agency reported that only 4.4% of active shooting events were ended by armed citizens, but Lott’s figures indicate that the number was actually more than 34%. That’s a very large discrepancy to account for. (Fox News) . . .
Jazz Shaw, “”Good guy with a gun” incidents more common than FBI claims,” Hot Air, October 5, 2022.
For many years, Second Amendment activists have claimed that citizens armed with guns have stopped or interfered with active shooters on many occasions, saving many lives.
But the FBI and gun control activists have dismissed that idea out of hand, saying the statistics simply don’t bear that out.
What if the statistics are wrong? And not just wrong, but spectacularly wrong to the point that it raises questions of FBI bias?
A new report from the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) says that the FBI’s data contains “massive errors” when examining active shooting incidents over the last eight years.
“Although collecting such data is fraught with challenges, some see a pattern of distortion in the FBI numbers because the errors almost exclusively go one way, minimizing the life-saving actions of armed citizens,” said Crime Prevention Research Center founder and president John Lott.
Fox News: . . .
A stunning new report from the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) says there have been “massive errors” in the FBI’s reports on active shooters in which armed citizens stopped the attacks, and a well-known scholar with extensive background on defensive gun uses says the FBI database of active shooters “cannot be trusted.”
The report, “Active Shooter Incidents in the United States in 2021,” identifies 360 “active shooter incidents” in the years spanning 2014-2021, including 124 in which an armed private citizen stopped the mayhem. But, as noted by Fox News, “The FBI identified 252 active shooter incidents during the same time period, with only 11 thwarted by armed citizens.”
The issue of defensive gun uses and active shooter misinformation was discussed at the Gun Rights Policy Conference by author and researcher John Lott, founder of the CPRC, now based in Montana. He told the audience about some of the research the center did last year, identifying stories about defensive gun uses during the first nine months. He said the five top newspapers in the country—the New York Times, Washington Post, the L.A. Times, USA Today and the Wall Street Journal—had a total of ten stories between them about such gun uses. Many of those reports noted something went wrong.
“By contrast,” Lott said, “they had something like 1,700 news stories about people being either murdered or wounded with guns. If you included gunshots by criminals, you had over 2,700 news stories. If you look at CNN and MSNBC, they had zero defensive gun stories over that period of time last year.”
Mauser told Ammoland via email, “Lott has the right of it. He is most meticulous in his analyses.”
For someone who follows news “religiously,” Lott said it would be easy to conclude that defensive gun uses virtually never occur, and the few times they do happen, something goes wrong. . . .
The Federal Bureau of Investigation continues to tarnish its own reputation by vastly downplaying — by a factor of more than 10 — the number of incidents in which armed Americans stop spree killers. According to the FBI, the same people who can find no evidence of crime on Hunter Biden’s laptop, only 4.4% of these incidents were stopped by a good guy “civilian” with a gun. Analysis by the Crime Prevention Research Center shows the actual number is closer to 50% or more in some instances.
Not only that, but with each passing year, the numbers of spree killings cut short by everyday Americans carrying firearms continues to steadily grow. That shouldn’t surprise anyone as more and more Americans get concealed carry licenses, to say nothing of the half of the nation now living under constitutional carry laws where good guys don’t need a permission slip to carry.
What’s more, in non-“gun-free” zones where good guys aren’t prohibited from carrying lawfully, the number of mass murders interrupted is over 50%. . . .
Recent polling indicates that an increasing number of Americans view the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) with distrust and disfavor. The results of a national survey conducted in August by Rasmussen Reports found that a majority of voters asked (53%) felt that the agency was not impartial and agreed with the drastic statement that “a group of politicized thugs at the top of the FBI … are using the FBI … as Joe Biden’s personal Gestapo.”
The FBI’s credibility isn’t likely to be bolstered by a new report from Dr. John Lott’s Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC). The report, Active Shooter Incidents in the United States in 2021, indicates that the FBI massively undercounted cases of defensive firearm use in the United States by ordinary citizens “by an order of more than ten…The FBI reported that armed citizens thwarted 4.4% of active shooter incidents, while the CPRC found 34.4%.”
“Active shooter incidents” are defined by the FBI as incidents in which an individual actively kills or attempts to kill people in a populated, public area, but it does not include incidents the agency “deems related to other criminal activity, such as a robbery or fighting over drug turf.”
The CPRC identified a total of 360 active shooter incidents in the period between 2014 and 2021 and “found that an armed citizen stopped 124” of those attacks. (The report adds that there were another 24 cases “where armed civilians stopped armed attacks, but the suspect didn’t fire his gun. Those cases are excluded from our calculations, though it could be argued that a civilian also stopped what likely could have been an active shooting event.”) By comparison, the “FBI reports that armed citizens only stopped 11 of the 252 active shooter incidents it identified for the period 2014-2021.”
The CPRC attributes the undercount to a couple of factors, “misclassified shootings” and “overlooked incidents.” “Misclassified shootings” included those in which the FBI failed to properly account for cases where the shooter fled the scene upon being confronted by a person lawfully carrying a firearm, mistakenly classified armed civilians as security professionals, or apparently ignored evidence of armed civilian engagement. The second factor refers to instances where the FBI “missed 25 incidents identified by CPRC where what would likely have been a mass public shooting was thwarted by armed civilians,” with “another 83 active shooting incidents that they missed.”
An additional shortcoming in the FBI’s analysis is that the agency doesn’t identify whether an incident occurred in a “gun-free zone” in which it was impossible for law-abiding and otherwise armed civilians to respond effectively. The CPRC estimates that “about half of these attacks occur where guns are banned,” which puts the overall armed civilian engagement percentages in a more accurate context. After taking the location (gun-free zone or not) into account, the report concludes that between 2014 and 2021, more than half (51%) of the active shooter incidents in places that allow people to legally carry were stopped by an armed citizen. Even more significantly, for 2021 alone that percentage was 58%. (Of course, given the limits of the underlying FBI definition, these numbers don’t represent all cases where a person legally carrying a handgun stopped a shooting event or other crime.)
The data differences appear to be a consistent problem with the FBI’s reporting on active shooter incidents.
In January 2021, in a paper written while he was a Senior Advisor for Research and Statistics at the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Policy, Dr. Lott revealed that the FBI’s active shooter incident reports from 2014 onwards contained major mistakes: “all five reports so far issued were found to have serious errors.”
Specifically, the FBI reports from 2015-2019 repeatedly excluded cases where an armed citizen had intervened in an active shooting incident. The paper identified at least six missing cases in 2018-2019 where a concealed handgun permit holder stopped the attacker, including an incident in Tumwater, Washington in which three concealed carry permittees confronted an attacker. Another case in 2018 had been counted by the FBI but without indicating that a private individual with a concealed handgun permit stopped the attack. Dr. Lott’s newest report indicates that the FBI was asked to correct these and other omissions but “they refused.” . . .
