John Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center found civilians carrying firearms ended 225 of 615 active shooter incidents between 2014 and 2025, or 36.6 percent. FBI tallies for those years listed 418 incidents and credited such civilians with only 16 stops.

While at the Department of Justice in the first Trump administration, Lott reviewed the bureau files and saw numerous omitted or misclassified civilian interventions. Researchers set aside 35 further cases in which law-abiding people with guns stopped attackers before any shot was fired.

The findings followed coverage of a father who used a gun to halt the Silver Rail Elementary School attack on October 15, 2026, including an Associated Press account that treated that outcome as uncommon and drew from the same FBI data.