These 12 Defensive Uses of Guns Support Student’s Plea for Armed Self-Defense

Amy Swearer / Lauren Grace Niesent /

After a gunman killed three students last month at Michigan State University, the campus was quickly awash in cries for more gun control. It wasn’t long before the Rock, a campus monument long used by students as a free canvas for promoting school events and social issues, became a focal point of pro-gun control messaging.

But someone, thought to be a student, repainted the Rock with a fundamentally different message to state legislators and campus officials: “Allow us to defend ourselves and carry on campus.”

For this unknown student, classmates’ tragic deaths clearly highlighted a problem that too few care to acknowledge—other than law enforcement officers, no one on campus that day had the lawful option of armed self-defense.

Michigan, like many other states, prohibits civilians (including holders of concealed carry permits) from possessing firearms inside college dorms or classrooms. Michigan State’s Board of Trustees took this one step further, prohibiting firearms “anywhere upon property governed by the board.”

Of course, none of these prohibitions stopped one man with violent intentions that day from carrying them out to horrific effect.

Although the university quickly sent a local artist to cover up the anonymous student’s message in support of the Second Amendment, no amount of paint will conceal the facts about armed self-defense. 

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 corroborated this reality, concluding 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 years.)

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

For these Americans and countless others, the ability to legally defend themselves with a firearm made a drastic difference.

Although it’s impossible to know how differently that day might have turned out at Michigan State University had the government not granted itself a campuswide monopoly on armed self-defense, the data is clear that active shooter situations often have better outcomes when others lawfully choose to defend themselves with firearms.

Unfortunately, most of these shootings occur (and will continue occurring) in places where the government both renders law-abiding citizens defenseless and fails to ensure that its own response will be sufficiently swift and certain to save lives when it matters most.

The reality is that, try as it might, law enforcement simply can’t keep every single person on a college campus (or anywhere else, for that matter) perfectly safe from threats of violence.

The risk of violent victimization does not end the moment someone steps onto a college campus. And, as at least one Michigan State student recognized, neither should the right to keep and bear arms in self-defense.

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