John Lott Just Caught the FBI Hiding Hundreds of American Gun Heroes

John Lott's Crime Prevention Research Center released numbers the FBI has never wanted published.

Those numbers accuse the FBI of crediting the wrong people for an entire decade.

The real gap between the two counts is almost too large to believe.

A Gun Rights Group Just Exposed a Decade of Bad FBI Math

Crime Prevention Research Center president John Lott dropped a number this week that the FBI cannot spin away.

Lott's count puts the tally at 615 active shooter incidents between 2014 and 2025, with armed citizens stopping 225 of them, a 36.6 percent clip.

FBI data for that same stretch counts just 418 incidents total, crediting armed citizens in only 16 cases.

Do the math and the federal government's official record comes up 209 armed citizens short of what actually happened.

Lott excluded another 35 cases entirely, incidents where armed citizens stopped attackers before a single shot was fired.

He says he first caught the FBI's undercount while reviewing its active-shooter reports during a stint at the Department of Justice in Trump's first term.

The Associated Press still pulls its active-shooter data straight from that same undercounted federal database.

Lott's center builds its count by cross-checking local police reports, court records and news coverage that the federal system simply never logs.

The 209 Heroes the FBI Never Credited

That gap is not a rounding error, it is nearly ten times what the FBI has ever been willing to credit.

Every one of those 209 incidents is a parent, a store clerk or a bystander the federal paperwork simply pretends never existed.

Oregon already handed the country a textbook example of exactly the kind of case Lott says keeps vanishing from the federal count.

Oregon Just Handed Lott's Report a Live Example

On October 15, 2026, a 16-year-old gunman shot through locked doors at Silver Rail Elementary School in Bend, Oregon, and killed three children and a teacher before police found him dead inside.

A teacher tackled the gunman first and wrestled for his shotgun before Kaylub Giamanco, a 36-year-old father of two students at that school, followed him inside and shot him.

Police Chief Mike Krantz confirmed Giamanco stopped the attack.

Trump praised him directly: "Thank goodness for a man that had a gun and knew how to use it," calling Giamanco a "great hero" who "took care of business."

Oregon Gov. Tina Kotek addressed Giamanco publicly too, but she never used the word hero, telling the community his "actions carry a heavy emotional burden" instead.

Records show the gunman had once been enrolled at that same school and had received special education services there himself, years before he turned his shotgun on a classroom full of kids with similar needs.

Reporting on his background also points to a home marked by a father's repeated arrests and a restraining order a judge had lifted not long before the attack.

Oregon already has some of the strictest gun laws in the country, and none of them stopped a shotgun his mother had bought for him from reaching that school.

A trained, armed parent did, and Lott's report says that happens far more often than Washington wants to admit.

What Every Family Loses When the Count Is Wrong

Every time the FBI's numbers get repeated as gospel, Americans hear that armed citizens barely matter.

Lott's data says the opposite: more than a third of active shooters in the past decade were stopped by someone carrying a gun who was not a police officer.

That is not a footnote, that is the headline the FBI buried for a decade.

Kaylub Giamanco did not wait for permission or a press release before he ran toward gunfire to protect a school full of children.

The next time a politician calls armed citizens a myth, point them to the number Lott just put in writing: 209 heroes the government never counted.

Sources:

• Breitbart News, "Report: Armed Citizens Stopped 36.6 Percent of 'Active Shooter Incidents' From 2014 Through 2025," Breitbart, October 26, 2026.
• Fox 9, "Armed Parent Stops Gunman in Deadly Oregon Elementary School Shooting," Fox 9, October 2026.
• The Daily Wire, "Oregon School Shooter Had Twisted Family History," The Daily Wire, October 2026.