If you watch entertainment television police shows, you would think something always seems to go wrong when guns are used defensively (including shooting bystanders to getting in the way of police to failing to protect the permit holder to continually having the gun stolen and use in a crime to it being used in an accidental shooting). During the ten years from 2014 to 2023, there were 180 active shooting cases (as defined by the FBI) where a concealed handgun permit holder stopped an active shooting attack. We decided to do a deep dive to see how many cases there were out of those 180 cases where a concealed handgun permit holder accidentally shot a bystander (one case, 0.56%), got in the way of police (zero cases, 0.0%), had the handgun taken away (one case, 0.56%), and got themselves killed (two cases, 1.1%). What was more common were cases where the permit holder was injured in saving the lives of others (44 cases, 24%). Fifty-eight of those cases were instances where a mass public shooting was likely prevented. An Excel file with the data is available here.
| A Deep Dive into Cases Where Civilians Stopped Active Shooters 2014 to 2023 | ||
| Number of the 180 cases that had this result | Percent of cases | |
| 1-accidentally shot a bystander | 1 | 0.56% |
| 2-got in the way of police | 0 | 0.00% |
| 3-had the gun taken away from them | 1 | 0.56% |
| 4-is themselves shot and wounded | 44 | 24.44% |
| 5-is themselves shot and killed | 2 | 1.11% |
