Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
Wall Street Journal reporter Mark Maremont is once again targeting Americans who lawfully carry concealed handguns. His latest article, “The Innocent Bystanders Caught in Deadly Crossfire of Self-Defense Shootings,” claims that legally armed civilians are putting innocent people at risk during self-defense encounters.
According to research compiled by John R. Lott Jr., president of the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), the evidence does not support that conclusion.
Maremont cites four incidents from 2022 to the present in which he claims concealed carry permit holders accidentally shot bystanders while defending themselves. However, Lott’s review of those cases shows that only two actually involved concealed carry permit holders, one in Massachusetts and one in Michigan.
The remaining cases do not fit the narrative. The Ohio incident involved an employee carrying a firearm at work. Not a concealed carry permit holder. The California case does not appear to involve a permit holder at all. Despite this, Maremont’s article repeatedly references concealed carry and discusses constitutional carry, even though none of the four cases occurred under constitutional carry laws.
Equally absent from the Wall Street Journal piece is basic context. Each year, an estimated 1.67 million Americans use firearms defensively. And roughly 21 million Americans hold concealed handgun permits, according to CPRC research. Against those numbers, four questionable examples over several years do not suggest a systemic problem.
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To better quantify the risk, Lott used ChatGPT and Grok to help identify cases over the past decade where concealed carry permit holders accidentally shot innocent bystanders. From 2016 through nearly all of 2025, only four such cases were identified, resulting in two deaths and two injuries. One additional case involved a security guard, which Lott notes arguably should not be counted as civilian concealed carry.
Even including that case, the total over nearly a decade amounts to five bystanders shot, with two killed and three wounded.
By comparison, CPRC’s review of police-involved shootings over the same period identified 20 incidents in which officers accidentally shot 28 bystanders, killing seven and wounding 21. In one case, a single officer wounded six bystanders.
The contrast becomes even sharper in active shooter incidents. Using the FBI’s definition, CPRC data shows that from 2014 to 2024, armed civilians stopped 199 of 562 active shooter attacks, compared to 167 stopped by police. Civilians accidentally shot bystanders in just one case, a 0.5 percent rate, while police did so at a rate over five times higher.
These findings were summarized in an amicus brief authored by John Lott for Wolford et al. v. Hawaii and submitted to the U.S. Supreme Court in November 2025.
The data tells a consistent story: lawful concealed carriers are overwhelmingly responsible, and the risks they pose to bystanders are extraordinarily rare. Especially when compared to police responses in similar high-risk situations.
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is a seasoned outdoorsman, lifelong hunter, and the kind of guy who’d rather track whitetails than scroll social media. As an editor for GunsAmerica, he’s got a sharp eye for spotting both solid gear and bad gun laws. Whether he’s deep in the woods or deep in editorial deadlines, Larry brings a no-nonsense, tell-it-like-it-is approach to firearms, hunting, and the great American tradition of self-reliance. If there’s a hot debate on gun rights or the latest in hunting tech, you can bet Larry’s got an opinion—and it’s probably backed up with both facts and field experience.
Experience:
– Licensed Bowhunter, Hunter, and Trapper – Experienced in ethical hunting and wildlife conservation.
– Concealed Carry Permit Holder (NYS & AZ) – Trained and licensed to carry in multiple states.
– 2A Journalist – Covering firearms legislation, Second Amendment issues, and gun rights for over a decade.
– Emergency Medical Technician (EMT) – Certified to provide emergency medical care in the field.
– Field-Tested Gear Reviewer – Hands-on experience with firearms, optics, and hunting tech.
Maremont is just trying to make a name for himself the only way he knows how. He really doesn’t care about people. He’s just doing it this way because he lacks the intelligence, imagination and perseverance to tackle the truth. Which is guns actually SAVE lives.
I’ve carried my whole life and have had occasion to pull my pistol, but never had to shoot the dumbass who I pulled it on. My friends worry about shooting innocents constantly. My philosophy is that if it has gone so bad you are shooting people, worries are secondary.
Four out of over million opportunities is insignificant. But it depends on who’s life at that moment is the most important. Yours or someone else that is not the aggressor. Understanding that too the left, if you are being victimized, you should stay a passive victim. As you should be happy to provide whatever the aggressor wants.
My favorite example…
2012 Empire State Building Shooting
“When confronted by the two officers, Johnson raised his weapon, but didn’t fire. The officers fired with a total of 16 rounds, killing Johnson and injuring nine bystanders, none of whom suffered life-threatening wounds.”
People will believe whatever they want regardless of if the facts prove otherwise. I’ve carried for over 40 years and never pulled my firearm except in training.
John Lott has been thoroughly discredited by every professional Statistician. He has been caught twisting and even faking statistics. Lott was even caught answering his own Facebook account with a fake identity
. Disputed survey
In the course of a dispute with Otis Dudley Duncan in 1999–2000,[48][49] Lott claimed to have undertaken a national survey of 2,424 respondents in 1997, the results of which were the source for claims he had made beginning in 1997.[49] However, in 2000 Lott was unable to produce the data or any records showing that the survey had been undertaken. He said the 1997 hard drive crash that had affected several projects with co-authors had destroyed his survey data set,[50] the original tally sheets had been abandoned with other personal property in his move from Chicago to Yale, and he could not recall the names of any of the students who he said had worked on it. Critics questioned whether the survey had ever taken place,[51] but Lott defends the survey’s existence and accuracy.[52]
Mary Rosh persona
In response to the dispute surrounding the missing survey, Lott used a sock puppet by the name of “Mary Rosh” to defend his own works on Usenet and elsewhere. After investigative work by libertarian blogger Julian Sanchez, Lott admitted to using the Mary Rosh persona.[51]
Further accusations claimed that Lott praised himself while posing as one of his former students[53][54] and that “Rosh” was used to post a favorable review of More Guns, Less Crime on Amazon.com. Lott has claimed that the review was written by his son and wife.[54] “I probably shouldn’t have done it—I know I shouldn’t have done it—but it’s hard to think of any big advantage I got except to be able to comment fictitiously,” Lott told The Washington Post in 2003.[54]
Safe storage gun laws
In a 2001 study, Lott and John E. Whitley reported that safe-storage gun laws not only did not reduce juvenile suicides or accidental gun deaths, but that they also increased rates of violent and property crime.[55] The study was criticized by Webster et al. in the Journal of the American Medical Association for using Tobit regression despite the fact that the data used in the study on youth suicides was “highly skewed and heteroskedastic”, and because the vast majority of crimes that Lott and Whitley claimed increased due to safe-storage laws occurred outside the home.[56] Webster and Carroll also wrote in Guns in American Society: An Encyclopedia of History, Politics, Culture, and the Law that the Lott and Whitley study’s findings with respect to crime were inconsistent with prior research.[57]
Lost Bush votes in the 2000 presidential election
In 2000, Lott argued, using a regression analysis, that George W. Bush lost at least 10,000 votes in Florida after the media incorrectly called the state for Al Gore while voting was still ongoing in the more conservative parts of the state.[60] Lott’s argument is used in the influential social science methodology textbook Rethinking Social Inquiry (edited by Henry Brady and David Collier) as an example of poor methodology. Contrary to Lott’s study, they show that the number of lost Bush votes ranged from 28 to 56.[60]
Illegal immigration and crime
Lott has non-peer-reviewed research that purports to show that undocumented immigrants are more crime-prone than U.S. citizens. In doing so, Lott lumped together both legal and illegal immigrants in prison into a category for illegal immigrants, leading to an elevated crime rate for illegal immigrants.[63][64] The Washington Post fact-checker wrote that this was a “significant flaw in Lott’s study that undercuts his conclusion. Lott says the overall thrust of his study still holds, but the issue muddles his research and invites guesswork as to the actual crime rate for the undocumented immigrant population in Arizona.”[65]
Lott’s claims were heavily promoted by the Trump administration to justify its anti-immigration policies, in particular their attempts to end DACA.[63][66
Dacian ??? Really shows how much you love John Lott! And ??? You do have your 1st amendment rights to
Interesting. Now point out the flaws/errors in the study actually in the article.
Nobody clips and pastes garbage, word-for-word, from Wikipedia better than Dacian.
What in the lower pit of hades is a gun hating Communist Progressive Criminal doing in this forum, besides being a LYING SOS?
And Anna Nicole married for love .
seems to me that the criminals are the ones shooting bystanders the most.