It’s increasingly clear that gun control activism thrives on ignorance about the nature of crime and the importance of the Second Amendment. Unfortunately, far too many Americans continue to buy hook, line, and sinker into activists’ mischaracterizations of reality.
Take, for example, one recent survey that discovered a shocking number of American voters erroneously believe that school shootings cause more gun deaths every year than gang violence.
In reality, even when using the broadest possible definition of “school shooting,” such events are far too rare to plausibly constitute a leading cause of gun deaths. Gang-related gun deaths outpace school shooting deaths by several orders of magnitude.
It’s just that gun control activists are content with misleading Americans about the nature of criminal gun violence.
At the same time, they intentionally downplay the protective function of the Second Amendment, dismissing lawful defensive gun use as uncommon and promoting baseless assertions that gun owners are more likely to have their guns turned against them by criminals than they are to successfully stop a violent attack.
That’s because the truth about defensive gun use undermines their demands for more restrictions on lawful gun ownership.
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 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 November. You may explore more by using The Heritage Foundation’s interactive Defensive Gun Use Database.
If we want to be serious about public safety, we need to accurately understand the nature of gun violence, as well as the important role that the right to keep and bear arms plays in helping ordinary citizens protect themselves and others from violent crime.
Otherwise, it’s far too easy to be persuaded that lawful gun owners are the problem instead of part of the solution.