The Crime Prevention Resource Center (CPRC) has released the results of an extensive study of the FBI's statistics on how often crimes are prevented by legally armed citizens. In a finding that should come as a surprise to no one, the CPRC has determined that the FBI has massively under-reported instances of defensive gun use by legal gun owners. My colleague Jeff Charles wrote about this a few weeks back, but let's take a little deeper dive into the numbers.

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What is particularly troubling is the unwillingness of the FBI and the media to correct these omissions when informed about them. When Dr. John Lott worked at the US Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Policy and the Office of Justice Programs in 2020, the FBI was notified of their omissions involving potential mass public shootings, but they refused to correct those errors. Lott had previously alerted the FBI to similar problems back in 2015 and he published the list in the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences Today in March 2015, but corrections were never made even after the FBI admitted they were missing cases.