Kaylub Giamanco, a 36-year-old carpenter, husband and father of two young daughters from Bend, Ore., crawled through a shot-out window at Silver Rail Elementary School where his daughters attend in pursuit of a sociopath with a shotgun. When recounting what happened that day, he said, “I swung the door open, and I stepped [into the classroom], and I fired, and they dropped to the ground ... . I looked down at the gunman, and he was scrambling for his weapon. And I looked at him, and I shot him two more times.”
Giamanco also said, “I want to recognize [the teacher]. She gave me the opportunity to make my shot without losing my life.”
Giamanco explained that his biggest regret is that he could not stop the killer before he took the lives of three children and another teacher.
These are the words, and gut-wrenching feelings, of an armed citizen who did what he could.
His heroics are hard to ignore.
But some in the media want to talk away heroes like Giamanco.
A few days after this horrific criminal act was stopped, AP put a story on its wire that began: “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.”
“Few” may be a subjective word, but factually, this is just not true.
Since January 2025, the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) has documented 16 defensive gun uses in which police say armed citizens stopped mass public killings.
Dr. John R. Lott, Jr., founder and president of CPRC, explains that “the AP bases its claim on data from the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training (ALERRT) Center, which the FBI uses for its active-shooting reports. But the story ignores detailed challenges to those data that have appeared in such places as The Washington Post, The Washington Times, and RealClearInvestigations.”
As Lott has said on the NRA’s The Armed Citizen Podcast, the “FBI defines an active shooter as someone actively killing or attempting to kill people in a populated, public area. An incident can qualify even if a gunman fires at just one person and misses. The category includes mass public shootings, but the FBI generally excludes shootings connected to other crimes, such as robberies or fights over drug turf.
“I encountered problems with these data firsthand. Until January 2021, I served as senior adviser for research and statistics in the Justice Department’s Office of Justice Programs, where my responsibilities included evaluating the FBI’s active-shooter reports. I discovered that the reports omitted or misclassified numerous cases in which armed civilians stopped attacks.”
Lott found that from 2014 through 2025, the FBI identified 408 active-shooter incidents, but that they credited armed citizens with stopping only 16 (about 4 percent). The CPRC, meanwhile, found many additional cases and publishes a constantly updated list on CrimeResearch.org.
“Our research tells a dramatically different story,” said Lott. “We identified 615 active-shooter incidents from 2014 through 2025 and found that armed citizens stopped 225 of them. We excluded another 35 cases in which law-abiding armed citizens stopped attackers before they could fire a shot. By our count, armed citizens stopped 36.6% of the active-shooter incidents identified over those 12 years, nearly 10 times the FBI’s 3.9%. Over the most recent five years, that figure rose to 42.5%.”
Lott also pointed out that this percentage rises even more if so-called gun-free zones—places where law-abiding citizens are forbidden from carrying concealed—are removed from the count. “Outside gun-free zones, we estimate that armed civilians stopped 56.3% of active-shooter attacks over the past five years,” said Lott.
In 2024, journalist John Stossel asked the FBI about this data. The FBI acknowledged that its data is “not intended to explore all active shooting incidents but rather to provide a baseline understanding.”
Really? But then why has the FBI chosen not to add this qualification to its reports and press releases on the topic?
Assembling this data, no doubt, takes time, and definitions need to be established in order for it to be comprehensible; however, Lott notes that many of the missed incidents are those that include armed citizens. For the public to have informed opinions, and for legislators to have the opportunity to write good policy, Americans need a true and clear understanding of the armed citizens’ role in society.
As President Donald Trump said at the White House after Giamanco risked his own life to save others: “It’s a terrible thing, but thank goodness for a man that had a gun and knew how to use it.”
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