Letter to the editor: 'Good guy with a gun' phenomenon is no myth
- CDC quietly removed decades of defensive gun use estimates after gun-control activists complained; Trump admin restored them in July, adjusting the low end from 60k to 500k instances annually.
- FBI active-shooter files are allegedly a mess: feds claim armed citizens stopped just 16 of 408 incidents since 2014, but Crime Prevention Research Center counts 225 defensive stops out of 615 total incidents.
- Idaho's In-N-Out shooting in August saw healthcare worker Jordan Salinas and an off-duty cop credited by law enforcement with stopping more deaths — a rarity in national media coverage.
- CPRC claims 15 similar police-credited defensive gun uses since January 2025 alone, busting the 'good guy with a gun is a myth' narrative pushed by gun-control advocates.
- Gun Violence Archive founder allegedly pressured CDC to scrub the data; the agency's own page had cited 60k to 2.5M defensive uses per year before the takedown.
Brief Summary
The feds have been playing hide-the-ball with the truth about armed citizens stopping mass shooters, and it took a Trump administration clean-up to let the numbers out of the closet. The CDC, under Biden-era political pressure, conveniently yanked its own defensive gun use estimates — a range from 500,000 to over 3 million annually — after gun-control advocates complained the data undermined their legislation push. Now the links are back and the low-end is corrected to at least 500k per year, which is still a hefty chunk of lives saved by private citizens that the mainstream media would rather ignore. Meanwhile, the FBI's active-shooter stats look like they were written by a committee whose only job was to make armed citizens look useless — reporting just 16 stops out of 408 incidents when the Crime Prevention Research Center, run by John Lott, counted 225 protective interventions in a larger sample of 615 shootings. The recent Idaho In-N-Out attack is a rare case where cops actually thanked a civilian for firing back, but news coverage treated it like a freak accident rather than a pattern. The story isn't that defensive gun use is rare — it's that the government spent years hiding how common it is.
Why This Matters
This data dump matters to you because it changes the conversation on gun policy from fantasy to math — and math doesn't care about your bumper sticker. When the agency in charge of public health and the FBI's crime stats both undercount or suppress evidence that armed civilians routinely stop mass casualty events, you're not just arguing about 'common sense' laws; you're debating what facts the public is even allowed to see. If 500,000 to 3 million defensive uses happen every year, that's a reality check for every politician who claims civilian firearms do nothing but kill. It also hits your wallet and your safety: if the feds can't track these incidents properly, the government is making national policy based on garbage data, and the media is happy to push that garbage as gospel. Whether you're a gun owner or not, you should be furious that a citizen-driven research group has to correct federal agencies on basic crime stats — that's not partisanship, that's incompetence.