Congressman Thomas Massie (R-KY) says there’s a concerted effort by the federal government and the legacy media to “debunk” the fact that guns in the hands of law-abiding citizens prevent crime and stop mass shooters.

Massie was referring to an article by Dr. John R. Lott Jr. that makes the case that the FBI, Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and legacy media outlets regularly suppress and hide data that proves that an armed citizenry is one of the most effective deterrents to a mass casualty attacks.

The CDC, FBI, and legacy media are conspiring to “debunk” the truth that armed, law-abiding citizens prevent crime and stop mass shootings. https://t.co/K87TNQR1pR

— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) September 4, 2024

High profile crimes, like the school shooting in Georgia that took 4 lives on Wednesday, tend to bring out the political and media opportunists who use the emotional leverage of sorrow and outrage to lobby for more stringent controls on private firearms ownership.

In his article, Dr. Lott cites examples of how legacy media plays up the idea that “good guys with guns keep failing to stop mass shootings.”

Meanwhile, the CDC has removed its estimates of defensive gun uses from its website after a 2013 report from the National Academies of Sciences showed that citizens use guns to stop crime anywhere from 64,000 to 3 million times a year. That data was removed after the CDC was lobbied by a gun control organization to remove it because it was being cited by “gun rights folks” to stop gun control legislation.

Lott also calls into question how the FBI defines an active shooter attack so loosely as to include any shooting in a public place whether a single person was shot at and missed or a number of people were shot and killed. The Texas University researchers that the FBI hired to compile its list, depended on Google searches of news stories for their data.

Lott says that means they were relying on a dataset that was actively predisposed to report in a way that was hostile to guns in the hands of private citizens.

As a result, of the 350 active shooter cases between 2014 to 2023, the FBI reported that only 14 of those shooters were stopped by armed citizens.

Lott’s Crime Prevention Research Center found that of 515 active shooter incidents between 2014 to 2023, armed citizens stopped 180, and that’s excluding 27 cases in which an armed citizen stopped a shooter before he could fire a shot.

As the election draws nearer, the gun control rhetoric is already intensifying.

Rep. Massie has a reminder for the next president of what the Second Amendment is really about.

Thomas Massie on the 2nd Amendment: "Our chief executive of this country would do well to understand what the second Amendment is really about.

It is about keeping an overzealous executive in check.

It is about securing all the other liberties in this Constitution.

It is… pic.twitter.com/zUNULTXjG1

— American Values 🗽 (@AV24org) September 5, 2024