Just minutes into a special Vacation Bible School Sunday service at CrossPointe Community Church in Wayne, Michigan, on June 22, parishioners found their morning worship interrupted by the terrible crack of gunshots outside.
A man clad in a tactical vest and carrying numerous firearms had driven erratically onto the premises of the church, apparently intent on killing as many worshippers as he could that morning.
Fortunately for the nearly 150 people inside—including numerous young children—some of the gunshots they heard were, in fact, the sounds of two armed church members returning fire and killing the gunman before he could enter the sanctuary.
The men who heroically defended their fellow worshippers are part of CrossPointe’s safety team, which they and other members founded about a decade ago in response to acts of violence committed in places of worship around the United States.
They’re ordinary civilians who took it upon themselves to train together regularly to respond to a variety of potential safety issues, including precisely these types of active-threat scenarios.
The actions of these men were certainly extraordinary, and the national headlines dedicated to their valor were deserved. But, at the same time, their lifesaving exercise of the right to keep and bear arms was hardly unique.
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, the most comprehensive study ever conducted on the issue concluded that roughly 1.6 million defensive gun uses occur in the United States every year.
For that reason, The Daily Signal publishes a monthly article compiling and 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 previous months and years here.)
The examples below represent only a small portion of the news stories on defensive gun use that we found in January. You may explore more by using The Heritage Foundation’s interactive Defensive Gun Use Database.
These examples underscore not only the importance of the right to keep and bear arms, but the often-overlooked reality of just how common defensive gun use is in American society.
Every day, ordinary Americans in extraordinary circumstances rely on the Second Amendment to protect themselves, their loved ones, and their communities from criminal violence. In so doing, they demonstrate time and again the incalculable value of an armed defense.