Come on, folks, this isn’t really hard. I thought we’d been over this. Bringing a knife to a gunfight simply isn’t a recipe for success…not in the criminal world or in law-abiding circles, either. We got another object lesson in this principle over the weekend from the People’s Republic of Oregon.
Police were called with a report of someone trying to break into a Medford, Oregon apartment at about 6:00p on Saturday. Then, a few minutes later, they got another call reporting shots fired.
According to KOBI . . .
Upon arrival, officers located a deceased male with apparent gunshot wounds, who preliminary investigations revealed had forced entry into the apartment and was advancing towards a resident with a knife.
Another resident fired in self defense.
The unidentified male with the rapidly decreasing body temperature learned the hard way that civilian gun ownership is kind of a big thing in this country. We’re pushing half a billion guns in this country…and those are just the official estimates. We’d lay good money the actual number is significantly higher.
And yes, in a free society, some people are going to misuse guns…primarily criminals and those who are mentally ill. But the other side of civilian gun ownership is a story that tends to get far less publicity (for some reason). It’s that gun owners use their firearms to protect themselves and their families from criminals and other assorted wackos.
The map above shows the Heritage Foundation’s tracking of defensive gun uses in the last 90 days. It’s just an approximation, because as Heritage makes clear, “There’s good reason to believe that most defensive gun uses are never reported to law enforcement, much less picked up by local or national media outlets.”
While estimates of the number of defensive gun uses range all over the board (between 50,000 and 3 million), depending on whose axe is being ground, one of the best approximations of DGU’s is Georgetown Professor William English’s 2021 National Firearms Survey. He pegged the number of annual defensive firearm uses at 1,670,000.
Whatever the exact figure, it’s clear that the number of Americans who use guns to defend themselves from assaults, robberies, rapes and murders every single year vastly exceeds the number who die by guns. Again, you won’t hear that talked about much. But then, that’s why come here.
“Upon arrival, officers located a deceased male with apparent gunshot wounds, who preliminary investigations revealed had forced entry into the apartment and was advancing towards a resident with a knife. Another resident fired in self defense.”
Don’t you just love a happy ending?
*Sniff*…
How often do good people use firearms annually to defend themselves in righteous self-defense? A lot more often than you might think.
I published a very reliable estimate on another website based on the number of dead bodies where law enforcement officially declared their demise to be legally justifiable homicide. I also factored in the fatality rate of gunshot wounds which is a well known number without controversy. Finally, I factored in a reasonable estimate of how often a defender would actually have to fire in self-defense and actually strike their attacker (versus the defender convincing their attacker to break-off the attack via brandishing or firing and missing.)
My above estimate pegs the number of times that good people used firearms in righteous self-defense at several hundred thousand times a year.
If I am feeling motivated after morning coffee and breakfast, I will post the analysis here.
I don’t have time to find a reliable source for annual justifiable homicides where the defender used a firearm. I will pick a number and we can scale the resulting estimate of how many times people use a firearm annually in righteous self-defense. For this analysis, I am going to assume as a reference point that good people used a firearm for justifiable homicide 1,000 times last year.
I am also going to use reasonable estimates of percentages for how often a defender does NOT have to fire in self-defense, how often a defender DOES have to fire in self-defense, how often a defender who fires hits the attacker, and how often a wounded attacker dies of his/her gunshot wounds.
Reasonable Estimates:
93% of defenders brandish without firing.
7% of defenders pull the trigger.
33% of defenders land shots on attacker if they pulled the trigger.
19% of attackers with gunshot wounds die.
Reasonable Estimate of People Using Firearms Annually in Righteous Self-defense:
Annual self-defense events = 1000 / 0.07 x 0.33 x 0.19
Annual self-defense events = 227,842
As I mentioned, if the number of justifiable homicides is different than 1,000 dead bodies annually, just scale the end result accordingly. For example, if there are only 500 justifiable homicides annually (which is half of my starting point of 1,000), then halve my estimated number of self-defense events from 227,842 down to 113,921. Similarly, if the number of justifiable homicides is twice my starting point of 1,000, then double my estimated number to 455,685 events.
Caveat: there have to be an additional number of justifiable homicides every year which law enforcement fails to categorize as justifiable homicides. In some cases law enforcement, without any useful information on a dead body, rightly assume that the dead body is a murder victim, when in fact the dead body is a violent attacker and the defender remained silent. There are probably additional instances where law enforcement never finds a dead body and thus cannot include them in the tally of justifiable homicides. Whatever that number is, it increases my above estimate of how often people use firearms in righteous self-defense every year.