After a transgender gunman targeted a Minneapolis Catholic school last month, killing two and wounding nearly two dozen others, gun control advocates predictably doubled down on their constant calls to impose every restriction imaginable on peaceable gun owners. As is usually the case, none of their default proposals would have saved a single life.
And, of course, gun control advocates failed to acknowledge how their desired regulations would significantly undermine the ability of ordinary Americans to fight back against the very types of criminal violence from which gun control fails to protect them. That’s in large part because many gun control advocates either don’t know—or simply don’t care—how often Americans rely on the right to keep and bear arms.
Almost every major study—including the most recent report on the subject by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—has found that Americans use their firearms in self-defense between 500,000 and 3 million times annually. In 2021, a professor at the Georgetown McDonough School of Business conducted the most comprehensive study ever on the issue, concluding that roughly 1.6 million defensive gun uses occur in the U.S. 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 August. You can explore more using The Heritage Foundation’s interactive Defensive Gun Use Database.
Tragedies like the Minnesota shooting are undeniably devastating. But they’re also statistically rare, especially compared to instances of lawful defensive gun use. Our response to unconscionable and extraordinary acts criminal gun violence cannot be to undermine the rights of ordinary Americans (like those described above) to defend themselves effectively against the most ordinary of criminal encounters.