A recent series of Wall Street Journal stories besmirching concealed carry practitioners has drawn the attention of John Lott, one of the nation’s foremost experts on criminal violence. And Lott, head of the nonpartisan Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), wasn’t content to let the author’s lies go unchallenged.
In a commentary at realclearpolitics.com headlined, “WSJ’s Fearmongering Doesn’t Survive Contact With The Evidence,” Lott explained how the Wall Street Journal has been depicting armed civilians as a major danger who shoot innocent bystanders, justifiably kill others whenever they personally believe “force is reasonably necessary,” and rely on racist self-defense laws. The series of accusations culminated with a December 6 front-page story by Mark Maremont presenting four stories from 2021 to the present where citizens who used a gun in self-defense accidentally shot a bystander.
To Lott, whose organizations has done more research on armed self-defense than any other group, quickly debunked the main theme of the story.
“… with more than 1.6 million defensive gun uses each year, almost 21 million permit holders, and 29 constitutional-carry states where a permit to carry isn’t necessary, four cases over four years offers little perspective,” Lott wrote. “Even worse, only two of the four cases even involve people who were legally carrying concealed handguns in public (one case each from Massachusetts and Michigan). In the Ohio case, the convenience store employee had the gun at her workplace, so concealed-carry laws didn’t apply. In the California case, the state required a permit, but there is no evidence that the individual had a permit.”
As Lott further explained, the article also wrongly made constitutional, or “permitless,” carry the culprit in the article, which makes no sense given the context.
“The Wall Street Journal article warns about the dangers of constitutional carry (what it calls ‘permitless carry’) and quotes gun-control advocates claiming that ‘When untrained or panicked shooters miss their target, it’s children, neighbors and bystanders who pay the price,’” Lott wrote. “Yet, not a single one of the article’s examples involved constitutional carry.”
Lott’s crew at CPRC decided to examine the issue further, using ChatGPT and Grok to search news reports and compile a list of cases from the past decade in which concealed-carry permit holders accidentally shot an innocent bystander. One listed incident involved a security guard, who arguably should not be counted.
“From 2016 to 2025, including the security-guard case, permit holders accidentally shot five bystanders—two killed and three wounded,” Lott reported. “Excluding the security guard, permit holders shot three bystanders—two killed and one wounded.”
Interestingly, Lott’s crew completed the same analysis of law enforcement officers.
“We then did the same review of police incidents from 2016 to 2025 and found 20 cases in which officers accidentally shot a total of 28 bystanders: six killed and 22 wounded,” Lott wrote. “In one case, an officer wounded six people; in another, three officers wounded three people. Some news stories do not make clear whether the criminal or the police shot the bystander, so these numbers may understate the total number of bystanders shot by police.”
Overall, according to Lott, excluding the security guard, police shot seven times more bystanders, killed three times more and wounded 22 times more than armed citizens did.
Lott continued with his debunking of the newspaper’s lies by also looking at other aspects of concealed carry that the newspaper got dead wrong. It’s the kind of information that needs to be read by all Americans, yet getting the word out is often difficult. To read Lott’s whole commentary and hopefully share it with a friend or two, click here.
Read the full article here
