Every 13 seconds an American gun owner uses a firearm in defense against a criminal. Officials maintain the use of firearms for self-defense is an important crime deterrent.
“Self-defense can be an important crime deterrent,” says a new report by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC).
Just how often do we use guns in self-defense? The gun owners’ lobby opposes restrictions on civilian acquisition and possession of firearms because, it contends, law-abiding people need guns to defend themselves. Millions of people also use guns for hunting and target-shooting. But at the core of the NRA’s argument is self-defense: the ultimate right to protect one’s ability to remain upright and breathing.
And yet, when it comes to guns and self-defense, gun control proponents want legislation that will restrict access to firearms. The rationale for such legislation is to reduce accidental shootings and the criminal use of guns against people.
But if harm reduction is the goal, policymakers should pause to consider how many crimes — murders, rapes, assaults, robberies — are thwarted by ordinary persons who were fortunate enough to have access to a gun.
Gun control proponents cannot deny that people use guns successfully against criminals, but they tend to play down how often such events take place.
In other words, guns save lives. The defensive use of guns is usually either not discussed at all in the media or else is depicted as if it means bullets flying in all directions, like the gunfight at the OK Corral.
But most defensive uses of guns do not involve pulling the trigger. If someone comes at you with a knife and you point a gun at him, he is very unlikely to keep coming, and far more likely to head in the other direction, perhaps in some haste, if he has a brain in his head. Only if he is an idiot are you likely to have to pull the trigger. And if he is an idiot with a knife coming after you, you had better have a trigger to pull.
All you must do is go to the Internet or your local library and read about the statistics that are now available to researchers. There are thousands of good and decent Americans who are alive today precisely because they had guns.
Gun control advocates might think the world would be a better place if those people and the ones you’re going to read about were dead and the people menacing them had gotten away with their crimes, but those of us who are serious about our Second Amendment rights disagree.
Meanwhile, leftist anti-gun zealots in D.C., N.Y. and L.A. should admit, once and for all, what they really want: the outlawing of privately-owned firearms by American citizens. Of course, they’ll never reveal their true motives, so instead tragedies such as the Newtown massacre are exploited to erode our Second Amendment rights.
The unspoken secret harbored among these gun-hating movie stars and politicians is that many of them have concealed carry permits, as do their armed bodyguards. Plus, they work in buildings protected by metal detectors and security personnel that brandish weapons. In other words, they’ll remain safe, but nobody else will.
—
How many rapes are prevented each year by a would-be victim possessing a firearm? An early 2021 study concluded that 650 rapes a day were stopped because the victim was — or may have been — armed.
The number of women who carry, and the number of homes with guns, is much higher now. The latest prison surveys estimate that 3,600 rapes a day are never attempted because the victim either showed a gun, or claimed she had a weapon or the rapist thought the victim had a gun for some other reason.
And yet, some gun control regulations would seemingly disarm women who might otherwise fall into harm’s way.
Guns make women safer. In a violent confrontation, guns reverse the balance of power. Armed with a gun, a woman may even have the advantage over a violent attacker.
More than 90 percent of violent crimes occur without a firearm, according to federal statistics. When a violent criminal threatens or attacks a woman, he rarely uses a gun. Attackers use their size and physical strength, preying on women who are at a severe disadvantage.
Here are some additional guns use statistics available on the Internet: According to the National Self Defense Survey conducted by Florida State University criminologists recently, the rate of Defensive Gun Uses can be projected nationwide to approximately 2.5 million per year — one Defensive Gun Use every 13 seconds.
Among 15.7 percent of gun defenders interviewed nationwide during The National Self Defense Survey, the defender believed that someone “almost certainly” would have died had the gun not been used for protection — a life saved by a privately held gun about once every 1.3 minutes.
“When you look at the bottom line,” one local gun store owner observed, “guns save more lives than they take; they prevent more injuries than they inflict.”
Guns also are used 2.5 million times a year in self-defense, according to the latest research statistics.
Law-abiding citizens use guns to defend themselves against criminals as many as 2.5 million times every year — or about 6,850 times a day. This means that each year, firearms are used more than 80 times more often to protect the lives of honest citizens than to take lives.
Of the 2.5 million times citizens use their guns to defend themselves every year, the overwhelming majority merely brandish their guns or fire a warning shot to scare off their attackers. Less than 8 percent of the time, a citizen will kill or wound his/her attacker.
When it comes to guns being used in self-defense, according to the authors of Cato’s recently released study on how often guns are used by citizens to prevent crime, “tens of thousands of crimes are prevented each year by ordinary citizens with guns.”
And in a study of more than 5,000 news reports over an eight-year period, Clayton Cramer and David Burnett showed that the mere presence of an armed citizen thwarts many crimes, even beyond those that are reported by the police and subsequently printed in the newspaper.
How often do Americans use guns for defensive purposes? Criminologist and researcher Gary Kleck (using his own commissioned phone surveys and number extrapolation) estimates that 2.5 million Americans use guns for defensive purposes each year. He further found that of those who had used guns defensively; one in six believed someone would have been dead if they had not resorted to their defensive use of firearms.
But regardless of whether we can fathom the evil and carnage that some rabid monsters commit, we must be prepared and ready to respond to evil at a moment’s notice, according to behavioral psychologists and law enforcement officers.
Sadly enough, however, another lunatic will commit more mass carnage like those in Paris recently or on our nation’s school grounds and shopping malls — maybe not tomorrow, next week or even next year. But it will happen again.
—
Top o’ the morning!