Despite these onerous new gun control laws and many others like them, in December, ordinary gun owners around the country were busy proving to gun control activists just how much their new restrictions miss the mark. Overwhelmingly, lawful gun owners are not the driving force behind criminal gun violence. On the contrary, as the stories below show, they are often their own best (or only) defense against criminal actors who are rarely deterred by restrictive gun laws.
Almost every major study has found that Americans use their firearms in self-defense between 500,000 and 3 million times annually, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has acknowledged. 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. …
If gun control activists had their way, many of these ordinary Americans would be treated just as harshly as the criminals against whom they protected themselves and others.
This isn’t hyperbole.
Under California’s new carry laws, if the incident in the museum parking lot in Denver had happened in California, the armed father would have faced criminal charges for defending himself with a firearm in a “parking area under the control of a zoo or museum.” And the heroic concealed carry permit holder in Chicago might well have been dissuaded from carrying his firearm to and from his job at an airport—another place where, as of Jan. 1, California banned the possession of firearms, unless kept inaccessible in a locked box.
So, too, would the man who defended his sister in Soso, Mississippi, with an AR-15—he would be facing criminal charges in restrictive states like California and Illinois—not because his actions weren’t self-evidently justified as self-defense, but because he used a type of firearm that is irrationally (and ironically) condemned by gun control activists as “not useful for lawful civilian purposes.”
— Amy Swearer in Gun Owners End 2023 Proving Gun Control Advocates Wrong