[BEARINGARMS] Active shooter events have been tracked by the FBI for over two decades. There are interesting results when those statistics are compared to other data. A new study states that civilian responses to these events are less adverse than police responses. The April 2025 study found that ''armed citizens do not interfere with police, and in active shooter situations, they reduce deaths and injuries significantly more effectively than the police.''
Dr. John R. Lott, Jr. from the Crime Prevention Research Center and Dr. Carlisle E. Moody, Professor of Economics, Emeritus from College of William and Mary, aggregated the data. Their paper, ''Do Armed Civilians Stop Active Shooters More Effectively Than Uniformed Police?'' was released on April 3.
For a list of cases, Moody and Lott pulled from the ''Active Shooter Incidents in the United States in 2023.'' The Federal Bureau of Investigation published the report. In order to compare those incidents with civilian responses, they pulled data from ''the Heritage Foundation, Defensive Gun Use Tracker, Gun Violence Archive, the American Rifleman, the Daily Signal, and Reddit that met the FBI's definition of an active shooting.''
The report notes that there's a complete list of ''cases where civilians have stopped active shooting attacks,'' which can be accessed at Crime Prevention Research Center's webpage.
Once all the data was compiled, some initial findings were observed.
''The first takeaway is, assuming our count is complete, that armed citizens have stopped more active shooter incidents than the police have, although the difference is not significantly different from zero,'' Lott and Moody noted. ''Also, armed citizens do not appear to interfere with the police or blunder so badly as to get their weapon taken away by the shooter or kill the wrong person.''
Moreover, one of the more significant findings was that ''according to police, armed citizens have stopped 57 active shooter events which otherwise were likely to have escalated into mass public shootings — where 'many' people risked being murdered.''
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