OPINION:
Censorship was a serious problem during the Biden administration.
President Trump has reversed some of the changes that President Biden made to information published by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), but serious problems remain elsewhere.
For years, gun-control activists have attacked what they call the “good-guy-with-a-gun myth.” Federal agencies and much of the national media have downplayed evidence that armed civilians stop mass shootings.
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But even the most dramatic defensive gun uses rarely attract national news coverage. One exception occurred in August, when healthcare worker Jordan Salinas fired at a gunman shooting at vehicles outside an In-N-Out restaurant in Twin Falls, Idaho.
Three people were killed in the shooting and at least seven were injured, but law enforcement credited Mr. Salinas and an off-duty police officer with preventing additional deaths.
Since the beginning of 2025 alone, the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), which I run, has identified 15 similar defensive gun uses in which police have credited armed civilians with preventing additional deaths.
The CDC provides another example of how federal agencies censor information. Until May 2022, it cited a 2013 National Academies of Sciences (NAS) report that it had co-sponsored. The report reviewed research producing widely varying estimates of defensive gun use, ranging from approximately 500,000 to more than 3 million annually.
Other research produced estimates as high as 3.5 million. The CDC’s own webpage cited a range of 60,000 to 2.5 million annually.
Mark Bryant, founder of the Gun Violence Archive, complained that “gun rights folks” repeatedly cited these estimates to oppose gun-control legislation. Soon afterward, the CDC took down the information.
In July, the Trump administration restored the discussion — and the link. The NAS report cautioned that the National Crime Victimization Survey estimate was “difficult to interpret because respondents were not asked specifically about defensive gun use.”
The Trump administration has corrected the lower end of the range, from 60,000 to 500,000 defensive gun uses per year.
The FBI’s active-shooter reports raise similar concerns about crime data. That agency has missed or misclassified numerous cases in which armed civilians stopped active shooters. According to its reports, armed citizens stopped only 16 of the 408 active-shooter incidents the agency identified from 2014 through 2025.
Yet the CPRC identified 615 active-shooter incidents and found that armed citizens stopped 225 of them.
JOHN R. LOTT JR.
President, Crime Prevention Research Center
Butte, Montana
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