I’m not originally from the United States, and when I go back home to visit, one of the questions that I get asked a lot is “why do Americans own so many guns?” My favorite writer on the gun ownership and self-defense issues is Amy Swearer, who writes for the Daily Signal. Below, I’ll link to two articles by her from July 2023 and August 2023.

The first article is a review of 12 examples of defensive gun use from July 2023.

She writes:

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.

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 other accounts here from past months and years. You also may follow @DailyDGU on Twitter for daily highlights of defensive gun uses.)

The examples below represent only a small portion of the news stories on defensive gun use that we found in July. You may explore more using The Heritage Foundation’s interactive Defensive Gun Use Database. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s multimedia news organization.)

Here are a couple of the examples:

• July 16, Philadelphia: A woman returned to her apartment to find four intruders inside, police said. She shot and wounded two of them, who were arrested and charged with burglary. The other two intruders fled.

• July 18, Washington, D.C.: Police said two armed carjackers approached a man near his vehicle and demanded it at gunpoint. The victim, a concealed carry permit holder, shot one assailant. Police arrested the wounded carjacker, who faces serious criminal charges, including for felony weapons offenses. The second carjacker had not been identified or located.
• July 19, Neptune, Florida: After an intruder forced his way into an elderly couple’s home, he came face to face with the homeowner, who was armed and held him at gunpoint until police arrived. Police said the intruder apparently had been released from prison after doing time for attempted sexual battery in 2018. He faces felony burglary charges.
• July 23, Carmichael, California: Police said an apartment resident used his gun to protect himself and his family from an armed man with a violent past who, wrongly believing his ex-girlfriend was inside, fired several rounds into the unit and tried to kick in the door. The resident returned fire, wounding the attacker. The intruder “is the bad guy here, let’s not hide from that,” a spokesman for the county sheriff’s office bluntly told reporters. “That resident is a hero.”
• July 27, Cassopolis, Michigan: An armed customer with a valid concealed carry permit shot and wounded a knife-wielding robber who threatened a gas station clerk, police said.

The second article is a review of 12 examples of defensive gun use from August 2023.

• Aug. 14, Centerville, Texas: A man began aggressively approaching customers at a local smokehouse then entered the restaurant’s restroom and assaulted an elderly man until he lay unconscious on the floor. When another patron tried to intervene, the assailant began assaulting him, as well. Fortunately, this patron was legally armed and was able to shoot and wound the man in self-defense. The assailant was arrested and charged with several criminal offenses.

• Aug. 18, Seminole County, Florida: A man was sitting on his porch with his dog when a “bear alert device” activated and he saw a black bear about 8 to 10 feet away from him. The man tried to scare the bear away by yelling, but it charged at him and his dog, so he shot it three times until it fled. State wildlife officials ultimately euthanized the injured bear and took her cubs to a rehabilitation center with plans to release them back into the wild later this year.

• Aug. 25, Somerville, Alabama: A man and woman were allegedly burglarizing a home when an armed neighbor confronted them and detained them at gunpoint until police arrived. The pair now face unspecified criminal charges.

• Aug. 28, Jackson, Michigan: A townhouse resident heard her neighbors having a loud argument, knocked on their adjoining wall, and asked them to quiet down. Instead of quieting down, a male neighbor angrily emerged from the home armed with a knife and began shattering the woman’s windows. She shot and injured him as he tried to force his way into her residence.

• Aug. 30, Butler, Pennsylvania: An armed resident shot and wounded an intoxicated intruder who broke into his basement. The resident initially ordered the intruder to put his hands on a nearby washing machine, but the man kept advancing toward him even after he fired a warning shot. The suspect was already wanted by local law enforcement for unspecified reasons and now faces an additional felony burglary charge.

It’s especially important for people living in blue cities or blue states to arm themselves, because the police forces in these areas have had their budgets slashed by Democrats. “Defund the police” sounds so good, but it just gets a lot of peaceful, law-abiding people killed.

It’s very important to ask secular leftists who want to ban law-abiding people from owning firearms “what do you expect people to do when criminals want to hurt them?” The answer I get from my atheist Democrat friend is that he expects them to call the police, and wait for them to arrive. There is a real suspicion among secular leftists of law-abiding people defend themselves – especially men. A man defending his family? Why, that’s “sexist”. Better to call the police and wait for them to arrive.

The peer-reviewed research

Whenever I get into discussions about gun control, I always mention two academic books by John R. Lott and Joyce Lee Malcolm.

• The Lott book was published by the University of Chicago Press (now in its 3rd edition)
• The Malcolm book was published by Harvard University Press

The book by economist John Lott, linked above, compares the crime rates of all U.S. states that have enacted concealed carry laws, and concludes that violent crime rates dropped after law-abiding citizens were allowed to carry legally-owned firearms. That’s the mirror image of Dr. Malcolm’s Harvard study, which shows that the 1997 UK gun ban caused violent crime rates to MORE THAN DOUBLE in the four years following the ban. But both studies affirm the same conclusion – more legal firearm ownership means less crime.

One of the common mistakes I see anti-gun advocates making is to use the metric of all “gun-related deaths”. First of all, this completely ignores the effects of hand gun ownership on violent crime, as we’ve seen. Take away the guns from law-abiding people and violent crime skyrockets. But using the “gun-related deaths” number is especially wrong, because it includes suicides committed with guns. This is the majority (about two thirds) of gun related deaths, even in a country like America that has a massive inner-city gun violence problem caused by the epidemic of single motherhood by choice. If you take out the gun-related SUICIDES, then the actual number of gun homicides has decreased as gun ownership has grown.

For a couple of useful graphs related to this point, check out this post over at the American Enterprise Institute.