Good day all. One of the reasons the 2nd Amendment was written was so people would have the means to defend themselves and others from doers of evil. From this came the phrase, “Good guy, (or girl), with a gun. There have been several incidents in the last year where one man or woman with a firearm was able to stop a potential massacre.
The Progressive Liberal Democrats hate the fact that law abiding citizens with a gun can and do stop criminals, usually with fatal results to the criminal. They will say that the Good Guy with a Gun is just a myth and that there are very few cases of this happening. They will point to some statistics provided by the FBI. Now there is information that the FBI is seriously under-counting the number of cases of non-law enforcement uses of guns to stop criminals. Here are the details from Fox News:
A new report from the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) argues that the FBI’s data contains “massive errors” when tracking active shooting incidents, undercounting how often armed citizens have thwarted active-shooting situations over the last eight years.
“Although collecting such data is fraught with challenges, some see a pattern of distortion in the FBI numbers because the errors almost exclusively go one way, minimizing the life-saving actions of armed citizens,” the report, which was provided to Fox News Digital this week by Crime Prevention Research Center founder and president John Lott, states.
The credibility of the FBI has been going downhill for years now and has pretty much cratered of late. That they might be “Juicing the numbers” or “Cooking the books” regarding citizens using guns to stop criminals is no longer surprising. However, the differences between the data sets by the CPRC and the FBI are striking.
Data released by the nonprofit shows that 34.4% of active shootings were thwarted by armed citizens between 2014 and 2021. However, FBI data show only 4.4% of active shootings were thwarted by armed citizens during that time period.
All in, 360 active shooter incidents were identified by CPRC between 2014 and 2021, with 124 stopped by armed citizens. The FBI identified 252 active shooter incidents during the same time period, with only 11 thwarted by armed citizens.
Only 11? I can think of two happening in the last year without even trying. One was a woman in Virginia who took out a whackjob who was firing into a crowd of party goers with a rifle. (That he should not have had since he was a convicted felon) The other that comes to mind was the young man in the mall who made a 40 yard shot, (Actually about a dozens shots with most hitting the bad guy), and stopped a mass shooting before it could get underway.
“Whether deliberately through bias or just incompetence, the FBI database of active shooters cannot be trusted,” Gary Mauser, an emeritus professor at Simon Fraser University in Canada, argues in the report.
I suspect it’s a mix of incompetence with a heavy dose of bias. Just reading the news and you can get better information then from the drek the FBI and DoJ are providing.
The FBI defines an active shooter as “one or more individuals actively engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a populated area.” The definition does not include crimes related to criminal activities such as robberies or gang wars.
Basically, it’s a whackjob who decides to go into a gun free zone and murder as many people as he, or in rare cases, they can before either getting taken out by police or killing themselves.
The report points to two variables that have caused the discrepancies between the FBI data and the group’s research: misclassified shootings and overlooked incidents.
The research argues that the FBI misclassified at least five cases, including two cases where citizens with valid firearm licenses thwarted a shooting, but the citizens were not listed in the report because police ultimately apprehended the suspects. The other three misidentified cases include one where “the FBI simply failed to mention citizen engagement at all,” and two others that categorized armed civilians as armed security members.
The discrepancies also are reflected in the FBI apparent oversight in not including 25 cases that likely would have been mass shootings and thwarted by armed citizens, according to the report. That is in addition to another 83 active shooting incidents that were not detailed in FBI data.
There are a few cases where the criminal is confronted by an armed citizen and either breaks and runs or kills themselves. The citizen may not have fired a single shot. If the criminal breaks contact and runs, then the citizen really doesn’t have the legal right to fire. The threat has been stopped. This is where the police come in. In any case, the good guy with the gun stopped the criminal.
Multiple instances of armed individuals thwarting potential mass shootings have played out this year, most notably in Indiana when legally-armed 22-year-old Elisjsha Dicken engaged an active shooter at a mall and was lauded for preventing more deaths.
“His actions were nothing short of heroic,” Greenwood Police Chief James Ison said in July of Dicken. “He engaged the gunman from quite a distance with a handgun. He was very proficient in that, very tactically sound. And as he moved to close in on the suspect, he was also motioning for people to exit behind him.”
It was also one hell of a shot. Mr. Dicken fired from a good 40 yards away at a lunatic armed with a rifle, hitting him, I believe, with 8 out of 10 shots fired.
The October CPRC report also detailed how often armed citizens thwarted potential mass shootings or mass shootings in areas where guns are allowed, as opposed to the increasingly more common gun-free zones found in some states and cities.
Between 2014 and 2021, there were 204 active shooting incidents carried out in areas that allowed people to carry firearms, according to the data. Out of the 204 cases, 104 of them were thwarted by an armed citizen, meaning 51% of attacks were thwarted by people legally carrying concealed handguns, according to the report.
That statistic proves the lie of gun free zones being meant to keep people safe. Unless they are filled with police or armed security details, all they are, is a target rich environment for bad people.
“When I was at the Department of Justice, they just refused to go and look at this. And that is whether the active shooting event occurred in a place where guns are banned. And the reason why that’s important is that if you have a place where guns are banned, it’s very likely that the law-abiding civilian is going to obey the rules that are there, and you can’t expect them to stop these types of attacks,” Lott told Fox News Digital.
There is a reason for this of course, and it’s political. The FBI and DoJ have long since moved to being political agencies. They’re also loaded with “Agents of the Deep State” and the one thing the so called Deep State can’t abide, is an armed populace. There are other reasons as well, one being that local police might not supply the FBI with the data for their own reasons. (Sheer sloppiness for one thing)
Lott noted in a Real Clear Investigations piece in August that law enforcement departments do not compile active shooter reports to the FBI, and that the FBI largely relies on news reports.
“There is no reason to think that the news media covers all the cases where civilians stopped attacks. And the farther back in time we go, the more cases we are likely to miss,” the October report notes.
In many cases, the MSM will either ignore or downplay reports where an armed citizen stopped an attack.
Other crime experts have also pointed out that media reports detailing armed citizens thwarting crimes cannot accurately capture the full picture. An armed citizen, for example, can merely display their firearm to thwart a crime or attack, which can oftentimes go unreported by police.
This is something else the Progressives won’t admit to. In what passes for their idea of logic, unless the armed citizen has fired and put down the criminal, then there was no use of a firearm or any other weapon. In many cases, all the armed citizen needed to do was either display his or her firearm, (Such as clearing whatever clothing is covering it and putting a hand on it, ready to draw, or actually drawing and aiming at the criminal), or make it known he or she was armed. Since most criminals aren’t suicidal, (Well, a lot of mass shooters are), they will break off and run away.
“National surveys find that firearms are rarely fired when used to stop a violent attack,” Professor Mauser told Real Clear Investigations last year. “Such cases are unlikely to be reported to the police, and even less likely to be found in media stories. Relying upon media stories would greatly underestimate the true number of defensive gun uses.”
When such a circumstance happens, where an armed citizen displays but doesn’t fire, it almost never makes the news. The basic rule for the MSM is “If it bleeds, it leads.” If a citizen stops an attack but doesn’t fire, then as far as the morons of the Mostly Stupid Media, it didn’t happen.
Therein is the proverbial rub. An armed citizen is not a police officer and doesn’t think like one. When someone decides to carry a gun, they’ve usually gone through some form of training. Part of this training also details when they can shoot and, more importantly, when they can’t. Gun owners have no interest in actually shooting someone, and if they can frighten off the bad guy and save themselves an others without firing, that’s fine. They will provide all the details they can to the police and let them deal with chasing down the criminal.
This report from the CPRC is just one more nail in the proverbial coffin of the FBI and the DoJ. They should be concentrating on stopping criminals of all sorts, and in a just world, would be welcoming the assistance of the Armed American Citizen. Instead, they’re not just politicized, they are being actively weaponized against the very people who they should be looking to for aid and support. Yet again, this is just more evidence that the FBI needs to be disbanded and the DoJ gutted like a fish by Congress.
Thatisall
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