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Jacob Paulsen at ConcealedCarry.com has taken the time to parse through some data from the FBI to uncover how successful armed citizens are at defending themselves during active shooter events. He writes:
We decided to take a look at one specific metric that John Lott and the FBI didn’t really consider. The success rate of armed citizens. John Lott’s team did talk about the overall success rate of armed citizens against all Active Shooter incidents in the US but they failed to consider the most important variable. OPPORTUNITY.
If we were to look at 100 active shooter events and an armed citizen was present at 1 of them and succeeded at stopping the active shooter then certainly we can say that armed citizens stop active shooters 1% of the time but in doing so we imply that armed citizens failed to stop 99% of active shooters.
This is an inaccurate implication since no armed citizen was available to stop the active shooter in the other 99 incidents. More helpful when considering the effectiveness of armed citizens in stopping active shooters would be to accurately state that Armed Citizens stopped 100% of active shooters at incidents at which an armed citizen was available to do so.
So the below graphic does just that. Of all the active shooter events there were 33 at which an armed citizen was present. Of those, Armed Citizens were successful at stopping the Active shooter 75.8% of the time (25 incidents) and were successful in reducing the loss of life in an additional 18.2% (6) of incidents. In only 2 of the 33 incidents (6.1%) was the Armed Citizen(s) not helpful in any way in stopping the active shooter or reducing the loss of life.
Thus the headline of our report that Armed Citizens Are Successful 94% Of The Time At Active Shooter Events.
Don’t take it from me take it from those citizens that are armed and are successful 94% of the time: you need to get your gun and your training now.
Read more from Paulsen here.