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These 12 Incidents of Defensive Gun Use Prove Armed Civilians Make Situations Safer

As two robber-hijackers got into a St. Louis woman's car Nov. 9, she had time to grab her own gun and shoot one of them. (Photo illustration: Sorapop Udomsri/EyeEm/Getty Images)

I testified earlier this month at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing in Chicago on underlying causes of the spikes in gun violence in that city and around the country.

Although Sen. Dick Durbin’s interruptions of my opening statement stole the show in many respects, it shouldn’t be overlooked that the Illinois Democrat also solicited disparaging remarks on the right to keep and bear arms from another witness—Chicago Police Superintendent David Brown.  

In direct response to one of Durbin’s questions, Brown remarked that armed civilians make police officers’ jobs more difficult, and that he never has seen a lawfully armed civilian make a situation safer.

This was certainly disappointing and should not take away from Brown’s important points with respect to underlying problems  of prosecutorial leniency and anti-police sentiment that devastates police morale.

But Brown also is quite mistaken about the reality of defensive uses of firearms. Americans—including those residing in Chicago—routinely use their guns to defend themselves and others from crime, rendering themselves and their communities safer from violence.

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

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 other accounts here from 2019, 2020, and so far this year.)

The examples below represent only a small portion of the news stories on defensive gun use that we found in November. 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.)

It’s possible that Brown, Chicago’s police superintendent, is unaware how routine these types of defensive gun uses are, both in his city and around the nation.

And it’s certainly true that armed criminals make life more difficult for law enforcement officers, and that sometimes officers make tragic mistakes in the heat of the moment, mistaking lawful gun owners for criminals.

But, respectfully, law enforcement officers already have little idea who around them is carrying a firearm, whether lawfully or unlawfully.

The fact that it might be more difficult to tell a “good guy” with a gun from a “bad guy” with a gun is not a valid reason for government to further restrict the exercise of constitutional rights.

It certainly doesn’t negate the plethora of times that law-abiding citizens swiftly and safely act as their own first line of defense against criminals when police can’t get there in time.

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