From Newsgroup: alt.politics.media

On 12 Sep 2026, "max headroom" <maximusheadroom@gmx.com> posted some news:118478b$12ro$1@dont-email.me:

CDC Undercounts Defensive Gun Uses | RealClearPolitics
By John R. Lott Jr.

Whoever controls crime data can shape the political debate. The Trump administration has already reversed some of the changes the Biden administration made to federal crime and gun data, including
information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).
But politicization of data at the FBI and Justice Department still
deserves attention.

Gun-control activists have long tried to "debunk" what they call the
"good guy with a gun myth" as they push for stricter gun-control laws.
The federal government and much of the media have reinforced that
argument by downplaying evidence that armed, law-abiding citizens stop
public attacks.

Unless it's a white CC who takes defensive action again a criminal of
color, then it's a racist attack.

Even the most dramatic defensive gun uses rarely get national news
coverage. One rare example of news coverage was in August of this
year, when Jordan Salinas shot at a gunman who was shooting at
vehicles outside a Twin Falls, Idaho, In-N-Out fast-food burger
restaurant. As one news story noted, Twin Falls County Sheriff Jack
Johnson said that "the death toll would have undoubtedly been higher
without the quick-thinking actions of Salinas and the off-duty cop."

Just since the beginning of 2025, there have been 15 such defensive
gun uses where police have made similar statements about armed
civilians acting to save many lives.

The CDC recently restored information on defensive gun use that it
removed from its website in 2022 after gun-control advocates privately pressured agency officials to take it down. Until May 2022, the CDC
cited a 2013 National Academies of Sciences report that the agency had co-sponsored. The report reviewed studies that produced widely varying estimates of defensive gun use. It cited an estimate of 108,000
defensive gun uses annually, but warns that "108,000 is difficult to interpret because respondents were not asked specifically about
defensive gun use." The report noted that estimates from national
surveys ranged from about 500,000 to more than 3 million defensive gun
uses per year.

Mark Bryant, the founder of the Gun Violence Archive, was among gun
control advocates who complained that gun-rights advocates had cited
the estimates so often to "stop [gun-control] legislation."

The CDC has now restored its link to the National Academies report,
but it misleadingly says the report puts defensive gun use at only
60,000 to 2.5 million defensive gun uses annually, not what the report
itself says as the national survey estimates that specifically ask
about defensive gun use range from about 500,000 to more than 3
million per year, though even that fails to note that the lower
estimate involves just handguns.

The FBI has also demonstrated how badly federal data can understate
defensive gun uses.

The FBI defines an active shooter as "one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area."
The category can include an attack in which a gunman fires at a single
person and misses, but it generally excludes shootings connected to
other criminal activity, such as robberies or fights over drug turf.

I have seen these problems with federal data firsthand. Until January
2021, I served in the U.S. Department of Justice as senior adviser for research and statistics in the Office of Justice Programs. Part of my
job involved evaluating the FBI's active-shooter reports. During my
time at DOJ, I discovered that the FBI had missed or misidentified
numerous cases in which armed civilians stopped active shooters.

Unfortunately, the problem has continued with the newest report that
was released on July 30. The FBI reports that armed citizens stopped
only 16 of the 408 active-shooter incidents it identified from 2014
through 2025. And only two of the 34 active shooting cases in 2025.

The Crime Prevention Research Center, which I run, has identified many additional cases that the FBI either missed or misclassified, and we
maintain an updated list of these incidents.

Our numbers tell a dramatically different story. From 2014 through
2025, the CPRC identified 615 active-shooter incidents and found that
armed citizens stopped 225 of them. We excluded another 35 cases in
which a law-abiding armed citizen stopped the attacker before he could
fire a shot.

That means armed citizens stopped 36.6% of the active-shooter
incidents we identified over those 12 years. During the most recent
five years, the figure rose to 42.5%. That rate is about 10 times the
roughly 4% rate indicated by the FBI's data.

The FBI is not a friend of the people.

The difference becomes even larger when we examine only places where law-abiding citizens can legally carry firearms. We shouldn't expect
armed civilians to stop many attacks in places where the law prohibits
them from carrying guns. In locations where citizens could legally
carry firearms, our data show that armed civilians stopped 52.9% of active-shooter attacks over the past 12 years. And it is increasing,
with 58.3% in 2025.

The FBI has missed so many defensive gun uses that I find it hard to
believe these omissions are simply accidental - particularly because
the agency has failed to correct mistakes I previously brought to its attention.

Fortunately, no one needs to take my word for it. The CPRC lists the individual cases and links to the underlying sources, so anyone can
examine the cases and compare our list with the FBI's data.

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2026/09/11/cdc_undercounts_ defensive_gun_uses_154492.html

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