Defensive Gun Use Saves Lives, but No One Is Measuring How Many

It was a sweltering afternoon at a Walmart near Traverse City, Michigan. Families moved up and down the aisles, oblivious to the danger looming nearby—until chaos erupted. In seconds, 11 people went from stunned shoppers to wounded victims of a knife attack. Panic rippled through the store. In what would become an unforgettable moment, United States Marine Derrick Perry sprang into action. With his legal pistol in hand, Mr. Perry locked eyes with the frenzied attacker. In that instant—without a single shot being fired—the man dropped his knife and countless lives were saved.This “good guy with a gun” story is far from anomalous. A month earlier, 250 miles away in Wayne, Michigan, a security guard at Crosspointe Community Church stopped a suspected shooter before any lives were lost, demonstrating how rapid intervention can prevent mass casualties.During the Greenwood Park Mall shooting in Greenwood, Indiana, on July 17, 2022, civilian bystander Elisjsha “Eli” Dicken, carrying legally under Indiana’s newly enacted constitutional carry law, neutralized the shooter within seconds—firing ten rounds from roughly forty yards and striking him eight times. Eyewitnesses credited his stunning marksmanship with saving numerous lives.Earlier this year, in Omaha, Nebraska, an armed civilian intervened during a nightclub rampage. When the gunman began firing into the crowd, the bystander returned fire, fatally stopping the assailant and likely preventing further injuries.While these dramatic interventions made headlines, they represent just a fraction of defensive gun uses that occur nationwide each year—many of which go unreported or unnoticed by the press or sometimes even police.“Most law-abiding civilian firearms owners are well-trained to be effective with their firearms, but lawful armed intervention doesn’t sell news story views,” Second Amendment attorney Cameron Atkinson tells the New York Sun. “Sadly, trauma, death, and grief sell views. So do bad guys. Very few people are interested in an ordinary person rising to the occasion, doing the right thing, and going on with their lives.”Ironically, if every intervention were reported by the media, defensive gun use cases likely would no longer be news. During the Obama administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that defensive gun uses occur 60,000 to 2.5 million times annually. “Defensive gun uses in the United States are far more common than most people realize,” says Senior Legal Fellow at The Heritage Foundation, Amy Swearer. In most cases, she adds, a gun owner merely has to display, rather than fire, a gun to deter an attacker. “That’s part of the reason why so few of these incidents receive any level of media attention—the ones that do make it into a local or national news story tend to be the most sensational, because those are most likely to be reported to police and be considered sufficiently newsworthy for the incident to warrant any write-up,” Ms. Swearer tells the Sun.While CDC data is regularly used by policymakers, researchers, and the public, the CDC stopped publishing defensive gun use statistics after a 2021 consultation with gun control advocacy groups. The center stated that the numbers were removed because they were old and often used to promote a specific agenda, which is not the purpose of the CDC’s site. Gun control organization, the Gun Violence Archive, a key advocate demanding the CDC data be removed, said the data used by the center from independent sources contained survey flaws that made the reporting of defensive gun uses unreliable. It counted only 1,220 defensive gun uses in all of 2024 and not more than 2,118 cases per year in the past 10 years. The discrepancy “can be explained by a false positive problem, which is endemic in surveys of rare events. A false positive in this case is when somebody in the survey claims they had a DGU when they did not actually have one,” the group states.While arguing that the CDC data, which traced back to 1995, was old and relied on self-reported surveys, which can be skewed by bias or incomplete information, it also acknowledged that its own data were derived only from “verified reports” in the news. The Giffords Law Center, named after the Arizona congresswoman, Gabby Giffords, who survived a mass shooting in 2011, said that the use of guns in homicides, suicides, and unintentional deaths far outweighs the incidents of guns used in self-defense. “Despite what the gun lobby wants you to believe, the truth is that self-defensive gun use is rare, and that guns are many times more likely to be used for suicide or homicide than they are for self defense,” the center states. Citing a 2003 study, it added that no credible evidence proves that concealed carry laws reduce crime. Ms. Swearer rejects that argument. “Out of the thousands of media-verified defensive gun uses we’ve reviewed over the years in our defensive gun use database, it’s quite uncommon for armed civilian interventions to ‘escalate’ the danger,” Ms. Swearer says. “The nature of lawful defensive gun use is such that when a person has drawn or fired their gun in self-defense, they were by definition already facing an imminent threat of death or serious bodily injury,” she adds. “We rarely come across cases where the defensive gun user unintentionally injures an innocent third party.”The FBI does not systematically track defensive gun uses, so official statistics significantly undercount these events. Nonetheless, one 2021 research project by Georgetown professor William English, which surveyed thousands of Americans, concluded an annual average of 1.2 million defensive gun uses. Roughly 30 percent of respondents said they had successfully used a firearm in self-defense at some point—most without firing a shot. The President of the Crime Prevention Research Center and former Senior Advisor for Research and Statistics at the U.S. Department of Justice, John Lott, says he believes the media are missing the narrative because they focus on the sensational, not the tragedy that was avoided. “There are many biases in how the media reports these cases. There are many cases where police will say that a concealed handgun permit holder has stopped what otherwise would have been a mass public shooting but that the incident only received local news,” Mr. Lott tells the Sun. He also suggested an interest among the media in avoiding reporting key details, like where shootings occur and who ends up a victim because they lived in a state where they are prevented from obtaining a carry permit. Twenty-nine states have Constitutional Carry, where it is no longer necessary for individuals to get a permit at all. Mr. Lott predicted that those states that make it expensive or difficult to obtain a permit are setting themselves up to report more victims of shootings, not survivors of deterrence.“The media will cover and mention the shooters’ manifestos and diaries but will never mention that (shooters) will say they picked their target because they wanted to go to a place where guns are banned. The media also refuses to mention that these mass public shootings overwhelmingly keep occurring in gun-free zones,” he adds.

Defensive Gun Use Saves Lives, but No One Is Measuring How Many

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