“It’s not rocket science. You make it risky for criminals to go and commit crime. Kash Patel has moved FBI agents out of the DC offices to around the country where the crime is. He’s increased arrests by like 100% there. You know, make it risky for criminals to commit crime. They’re going to commit less crime,” that, according to economist and expert on guns and crime, John Lott. . . .
Amanda Head, “Stats say mass killings at 20-year low, but Americans don’t feel it,” Just the News, December 23, 2025. Also at Lucianne.com and Off the Press.
A recent series of Wall Street Journal stories besmirching concealed carry practitioners has drawn the attention of John Lott, one of the nation’s foremost experts on criminal violence. And Lott, head of the nonpartisan Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), wasn’t content to let the author’s lies go unchallenged.
In a commentary at realclearpolitics.com headlined, “WSJ’s Fearmongering Doesn’t Survive Contact With The Evidence,” Lott explained how the Wall Street Journal has been depicting armed civilians as a major danger who shoot innocent bystanders, justifiably kill others whenever they personally believe “force is reasonably necessary,” and rely on racist self-defense laws. The series of accusations culminated with a December 6 front-page story by Mark Maremont presenting four stories from 2021 to the present where citizens who used a gun in self-defense accidentally shot a bystander.
To Lott, whose organizations has done more research on armed self-defense than any other group, quickly debunked the main theme of the story. . . .
Fact is, according to the Crime Prevention Research Center (CRPC), armed citizens stopped 51.5% of active shooters between 2014 and 2023. But that’s something gun-ban advocates would prefer not to discuss, as it doesn’t fit their “guns are the problem” narrative.
“Well, the script is about to flip,” she continued, “because a new study by the Crime Prevention Research Center reveals that armed civilians stopped over one-third of active criminal shooters between 2014 and 2024. Nearly ten times higher than the FBI’s reported 3.7 percent average.”
“With even more Americans getting armed post-2020, just last year alone in 2024, civilians stopped half of all criminal shooters,” she said. “And as I just stated, the FBI recorded zero of them.”
“How is this possible? While digging for the study, researchers found that police were often falsely credited instead of the armed civilian, which is a recording pattern that clearly increased over the last ten years,” she said. “But now this begs the question, why would they work so hard to hide the significant benefits of an armed public?” . . .
A new analysis from the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) says the FBI has dramatically undercounted how often armed citizens stop active shooters. Where the FBI has long told the public that civilians intervene successfully in just 3.7% of cases from 2014–2024, CPRC argues the true rate is at least 36% – and, when incidents in gun-free zones are excluded, the average rises above 52%, with 2024 hitting 62.5%. CPRC’s president, economist John R. Lott Jr., says the implications are straightforward: law-abiding citizens stop attackers far more often than the official narrative suggests. . . .
Perhaps Australian leftists should learn from our experience in the USA, where countless studies confirm that guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens deter or outright thwart crimes, to such a degree that the net result of firearm possession by the general public is undeniably a societal benefit. (See John Lott’s groundbreaking work on the subject, “More Guns, Less Crime,” for specifics.
The article has nothing to say about how armed U.S. citizens routinely and effectively protect themselves from threats because they can own modern-day weapons to fight modern-day bad guys. While the FBI has been accused of severely underestimating the number of incidents where a good civilian with a gun stops a bad criminal, the Crime Prevention Research Center looked at 561 cases from 2023-2024 and found that armed civilians stopped 202 (36%). When you look only at shootings where civilians stopped a bad guy outside of gun-free zones (bad guys’ favorite target of choice), it jumps to more than 52%. . . .
Dr. John Lott’s Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) has released its latest annual report on the state of concealed carry in the United States. Concealed Carry Permit Holders Across the United States: 2025, authored by Dr. Lott, Carlisle Moody and Rujun Wang, tracks trends in the number and characteristics of concealed carry permit holders and developments in constitutional carry (a.k.a. permitless carry) laws.
The report itself is well worth a read, but the highlights are:
Constitutional carry is now the law in 29 states, meaning almost half of Americans (46.8% or 157.6 million) now live in a jurisdiction that allows constitutional carry. In terms of physical land mass, constitutional carry is the law in 67.7% of the land in the country.
After peaking at 22 million in 2022, the number of concealed carry permit holders fell by 0.59 million last year to a current total of 20.88 million, with the primary reason for the drop being the expansion of constitutional carry. “[W]hile permits are increasing in the non-Constitutional Carry states, they fell in the Constitutional Carry ones even though more people are clearly carrying in those states.” . . .
After the attack, questions are swirling about how this could have happened to a country with strict gun control laws. However, as documented in research conducted by Dr. John Lott, Founder of the Crime Prevention Research Center, mass shootings often happen in places with strict gun control laws or in “gun-free zones.” . . .
