| Dear Diogenes: One of the most frustrating problems I face is the FBI's manipulation of crime data. Last year, the FBI concealed the revised increase in crime rates before the election. The agency not only underreports how often legally armed civilians stop active shootings, but the distortion has worsened. Over the last three years, the FBI claimed armed good Samaritans stopped only three attacks. In reality, we documented 78 cases—a 26-fold difference. I detail this evidence in my new piece at Real Clear Investigations. In 2024, while the FBI claims there were no cases where civilians stopped active shootings, we found they 48% of the attacks and 63% of the attacks if you exclude gun-free zones. For those who want to verify the cases and see how they fit the FBI's own definition of active shootings, you can review the documented incidents and links to the original news stories here. We also put these 202 misidentified cases through ChatGPT as a check to see whether others would agree that they meet the FBI's definition, and ChatGPT agreed with all our classifications. I presented this data at the Gun Rights Policy Conference this past weekend. Another op-ed in The Federalist counters the media's absurd claims that most extremist murders are by right-wingers. We also updated our data on the political and religious views of mass public shooters—though these account for only a fraction of all extremist murderers. Bill Cunningham invited me onto his national radio show to discuss the findings. I also recently spoke at New York City's Monday Meeting, where I addressed the recent attacks in Minneapolis at a school, on Charlotte's train, and the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Radio shows in Mary Walter Radio Show, Cincinnati's WLW, and Bill Martinez's national show discussed the dangers of gun-free zones. Our past work on the inability of mental health experts to identify people who engage in mass public shootings was discussed on Stinchfield Tonight on Real America's Voice and Cleveland's Bob Frantz Show. Over the last couple weeks, our research has gotten news coverage in The Blaze, Governing magazine, Townhall, and other places. Regarding stories of defensive gun use, here is an instance of a woman shooting a man who had repeatedly abused and beaten her to protect herself and her children. As the police office in the video says, the woman "had no other choice but to defend herself and that is why people have guns." We have updated our list of defensive gun uses by people legally carrying concealed handguns for January 2025. If you haven't already seen it, please watch our new video with John Stossel, which covers our new research showing errors in the FBI's active shooting reports. Five of my books have now been translated into Portuguese. For those who haven't already done so, if you would like to help us get the information out to others, please consider posting reviews of our website on the Google business page that we have set up. The more positive reviews people post, the more Google will feature our webpage in their searches. Thank you very much! We need help getting our research out. It doesn't do us any good to do all this work if people don't see it. If you have friends you think might find our emails interesting, please encourage them to sign up by sending them the link here. Thank you very much. We need your support to continue doing the work that we do. I don't think that there is any organization with as small of a budget that regularly produces as much as we do. Thank you very much. . Research . Op-eds . Recent Talks . Television/Podcast interviews . Radio interviews/Podcasts . Media Coverage . Amicus Brief . Televisions/Movie Show Bias on Guns . Defensive Gun Uses . Other Testimony . Other Crime Prevention Research Center 358 S 700 E, Ste B, B409, Salt Lake City, UT 84102
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