Do you have a gun?

Bad idea, says Hollywood. Civilians with guns are fools. You are more likely to hurt yourself than the evil one.

“Leave it to a good guy with a gun to really screw things up,” says a cop on ABC’s “The Rookie.”

Liberal politicians agree.

“A good guy with a gun is going to stop bad guys with a gun?! That doesn’t work,” New York Gov. Kathy Hochul smiles.

“A youth rescue fantasy,” adds an “expert” at CBS.

Now, I’m not a gun person. I grew up among left wing gun haters. I assumed Hollywood and “experts” were right.

When I saw economist John Lott’s book, “More Guns, Less Crime,” I rolled my eyes. But now I understand that Lott makes a good point.

“A couple of million times a year, people use guns defensively,” he says in mine new video. “When a civilian tries to stop one of these cases, they are overwhelmingly successful.”

But FBI reports say self-defense with a gun is rare.

“They’re just missing a huge number of cases,” says Lott. He is posted a list of cases the FBI ignored, where civilians stopped shooters.

The FBI lists the shooting at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando. Forty-nine people were killed.

“A week after that,” says Lott, “there was a similar attack at a nightclub in South Carolina.”

But there a civilian shot the attacker.

“Still had 125 rounds on him when he was stopped!” says Lott.

Somehow the FBI missed that case, along with so many others.

When 17 people were killed in Parkland, Florida, it got a lot of news coverage.

Few people know that “just a few months later in Titusville, Florida, (at) an elementary school,” Lott says, “a man came up, started shooting his gun. Fortunately, a hot dog vendor (with a) concealed handgun was able to wound the attacker and stop him before he could kill.”

“Stepped in and saved a lot of people’s lives,” said a local police officer.

But the FBI somehow missed that too…

Lott’s list of ignored cases includes the story of Raul Mendez, who was at a party when a guest opened fire.

“The bullet enters right by my ear, goes right through my face and out through my left eye… Blind in one eye and covered in blood, I unloaded four shots and finished him off.”

Mendez probably saved the lives of a dozen people at that party.

I tell him, “The FBI records instances like this, but somehow they have no record of your case.”

“They don’t record the true numbers,” Mendez replies.

I ask Lott why.

“There are a lot of political views infecting their data,” he says. “I had interactions with the people in the FBI … I had people tell me, ‘yeah, I’m a Democrat.'”

I push back. “The FBI, which carries guns, is anti-gun? It’s not credible.”

“They think it would go against the narrative that they want to push,” Lott replied.

Stossel TV asked the FBI why they don’t include self-defense cases like Mendez. They responded that their data is: “not intended to explore all aspects of active shooter incidents.”

Too bad politicians and the media don’t realize that.

“It would be great if we could just make all the guns go away,” says Lott. “But when you ban guns, it’s basically the most law-abiding good citizens who obey. Every place in the world that has banned all guns or all handguns has seen homicide rates go up.”

So-called experts such as a psychiatrist at Detroit’s CBS station say confidently: “There have not been good guys with a gun that stops mass shootings. That’s what you learn from reading comic books!”

Mendez responds: “I was prepared, and it saved lives. There’s no comic book about it. It’s the facts. It’s what happened. I was there. I’m sure there are many more out there who aren’t being heard.”