Yes, Armed Civilians Can — and Do — Stop Mass Shootings

Two days after last week’s attack on an Oregon elementary school, the Associated Press opened a news story with a familiar claim: “Few mass shootings in the U.S. end like the deadly attack on an Oregon elementary school: with an armed civilian opening fire on the gunman.” NPR also noted “how rarely an armed civilian ends an attack like this.”

Yet since January 2025, the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) has documented 16 defensive gun uses in which police credited armed civilians with stopping what otherwise might have become mass public shootings, as in the attack in Oregon. During that same period, five mass public shootings occurred in the U.S. and Puerto Rico.