Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics

 Anyone who has been paying attention will know that the Biden administration was anti-gun, at least for guns in your and my hands, from the top on down. And while the Biden administration has been the most anti-gun, they are alone.  I think every administration has been anti-gun to a greater or lesser degree.  Of course, they all loved guns in government's hands.

Now, I have never understood this philosophy.  Being against a tool, an inanimate object, really doesn't make sense.  In many ways guns are like fire extinguishers.  You have them in case of need, but no sane person hopes to have a need.  Unlike Hollywood, where the police, for example, are drawing their guns on every show, most police officers never draw their guns, much less actually shoot them except to qualify annually.  Yet they all carry them, just in case.

Mike McDaniel at the American Thinker has a post today entitled Citizens stop armed attackers; the FBI lies in which he makes clear the degree to which the Biden administrations animus toward guns in private hands has distorted the FBI's statistics. McDaniel does this by comparing the FBI statics to similar ones from John Lott's Crime Prevention Research Center. As he notes, Lott has been rather famous in the gun community for carefully researched statistics, which he showed us in his book 'More Guns, Less Crime.' Here he looked at the effects of crime and gun laws on a county-by-county basis over time for all counties in the United States. It was stunning, and he made his research available to other statisticians. Nobody could refute Lott's statistics or his conclusions. So gun grabbers did what they always do: tried to impugn his character.

McDaniel writes:

But there’s another area of data collection and dissemination where the FBI has been deceiving the public, and Lott, once again, exposes their lies:

I’ve seen many cases of politicized data. Until January 2021, I worked in the U.S. Department of Justice as the senior advisor for research and statistics in the Office of Justice Programs, and part of my job was to evaluate the FBI’s active shooting reports. During my time with the DOJ, I discovered that the FBI either missed or misidentified many cases of civilians using guns to stop attacks. For instance, the FBI continues to report that armed citizens stopped only 14 of the 350 active shooter cases identified between 2014 to 2023.

The Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), which I run, has found many more missed cases and is keeping an updated list. As such, the CPRC numbers tell a much different story: Out of 515 active shooter incidents from 2014 to 2023, armed citizens stopped 180, saving countless innocent lives. Our numbers even excluded 27 cases where a law-abiding citizen with a gun stopped an attacker before he could fire a shot.

The FBI’s lack of accuracy on this issue is no surprise. One of the most enduring D/s/c narratives is the idea that Normal Americans shouldn’t be allowed to have guns. They’ll just shoot themselves or their families, and worse, they might shoot criminals! Only the police should be armed because they’re the professionals. So of course, the FBI would support that narrative by claiming citizens virtually never stop active shooters.

Please go read the entire post and be aware that the government has been gaslighting you on this issue as well.