12 Defensive Gun Uses Show That Armed Citizens Make Communities Safer

Amy Swearer /

As the nation continues to reel from historic violent crime spikes, many gun control activists turn reflexively to the same “bumper sticker slogan” policy “solutions” that fail to address real problems while often undermining the Second Amendment rights of peaceable citizens.

Last week, some Hartford, Connecticut, residents made headlines for taking a different approach. Instead of demanding that their fellow citizens abandon their rights to armed self-defense, they announced that they would henceforth start exercising those rights in a public manner to enhance community safety.

These residents say they will soon start conducting “legal, armed community patrols” on a regular basis, with the goal of preventing gun violence in a city experiencing homicide totals not seen in several decades. Organizers told reporters that patrol members will be trained to calmly de-escalate situations when possible and emphasized that they won’t openly carry firearms once a new state law prohibiting the practice goes into effect.

The Hartford Police Department, to its credit, has indicated that these community patrols won’t face pushback from officers “as long as they are operating within the law,” acknowledging that these citizens “have Second Amendment rights like the rest of us.”

While some will certainly consider the residents’ decision to be controversial, the reality is that the right to keep and bear arms, whether exercised individually or collectively, has always played an important role in protecting life, liberty, and property—and it continues to do so today.

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 X, formerly 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 August. You may explore more using The Heritage Foundation’s interactive Defensive Gun Use Database. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s multimedia news organization.)

As these defensive gun uses demonstrate, lawful gun owners are more than capable of exercising their Second Amendment rights in a responsible manner, and on the whole, they make their communities safer by helping to stop violent threats.

While most communities won’t feel the need to organize armed citizen patrols, they should nonetheless embrace their fellow citizens who choose to individually exercise their right to keep and bear arms.

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