Just before Easter weekend, a 20-year-old student opened fire inside Florida State University’s student union, killing two and wounding six others before being shot and apprehended by law enforcement officers. Recent reports suggest that the suspect suffered from significant childhood trauma related to his parents’ divorce and custody battles, and many of his classmates had previously expressed concerns about his alarming rhetoric.
Almost immediately after the shooting, some gun control activists sought to cast the blame on supposedly “lax” gun laws, and they called for a slew of new restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms.
It doesn’t matter to them, of course, that Florida prohibits individuals under the age of 21 from purchasing firearms or that the gunman used a handgun belonging to his stepmom, a sheriff’s deputy. Nor does it seem to matter that Florida’s permitless public carry laws apply only to people 21 or older, and even then, the law still prohibits the carrying of firearms on college or university campuses. Apparently forgotten, too, is the fact that Florida already imposes waiting periods on gun purchases and has so-called red flag laws that allow local law enforcement to disarm allegedly dangerous persons via court orders.
At the same time, many of these gun control advocates refuse to acknowledge the very real barriers their preferred restrictions would place on the right of peaceable citizens to keep and bear arms—a right that often makes all the difference in the world for victims of violent crime.
Almost every major study has found that Americans use their firearms in self-defense between 500,000 and 3 million times annually, according to the most recent report on the subject by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2021, a professor at the Georgetown McDonough School of Business conducted the most comprehensive study ever on the issue, and concluded that roughly 1.6 million defensive gun uses occur in the United States every year.
For this reason, The Daily Signal publishes a monthly article highlighting some of the previous month’s many news stories on defensive gun use that you may have missed—or that might not have made it to the national spotlight in the first place. (Read accounts from past months and years here.)
The examples below represent only a small portion of the news stories on defensive gun use during crimes that we found in March. You may explore more by using The Heritage Foundation’s interactive Defensive Gun Use Database.
Nobody seriously doubts that what happened at Florida State University is a tragedy, the recurrence of which we are all invested in preventing. But any solutions must not come at the cost of overly burdening the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens, especially when those burdens threaten to interfere with the ability of innocent victims to protect themselves and others.