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12 Defensive Gun Uses Underscore Fallacy of Mexico’s Lawsuit

In one incident last month, a Virginia woman shot and killed an armed man with a mask who approached her as she left her house. (Photo illustration: Flying Colours Ltd/Getty Images)

The Mexican government announced a lawsuit earlier this month against several high-profile U.S. gun manufacturers.

Mexico accuses the U.S. companies of “negligent practices” it claims are driving gun violence in Mexico by arming drug cartels with “military grade weapons.”  

Put aside for a moment that the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act likely bars the lawsuit, or that these companies are not responsible for any “lax enforcement” of gun laws in either nation.

Put aside, too, that any truly “military grade” weapons in the hands of drug cartels don’t come from the U.S. civilian gun market, but from Central America via the black market and from the Mexican government itself via corruption and military desertion.

The Mexican government clearly has missed the larger underlying point. Despite that country’s incredibly restrictive gun laws—indeed, arguably because of these laws—its peaceable citizens are defenseless against well-armed gangs that care nothing about law and order.

By contrast, Americans aren’t left defenseless when the government can’t or won’t be there to protect them.

Almost every major study on the issue has found that Americans use their firearms in self-defense between 500,000 and 3 million times a year, according to a 2013 report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

We have good reason to believe that many of these defensive gun uses aren’t reported to police, much less make the local or national news.

For this reason, The Daily Signal each month publishes an 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 accounts from 2019 and 2020 here.) 

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 by using The Heritage Foundation’s interactive Defensive Gun Use Database. (The Daily Signal is the multimedia news organization of The Heritage Foundation.)

Rather than shifting blame to lawful U.S. businesses that already comply with a myriad of federal laws and regulations, Mexico should consider learning from the U.S. and allow far more of its own peaceable citizens to protect themselves lawfully with firearms.

Until then, Mexico’s largely unarmed citizens will continue to be left at the mercy of well-armed drug cartels that fear neither the government nor the people.

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