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12 More Incidents in Which Lawful Gun Owners Stopped Criminals

When a man with a knife attacked a woman as she entered a residential building Oct. 13 in Chicago, a second woman armed with a gun shot the assailant multiple times. (Photo illustration: Kashin Sergey Alekseevich/Getty Images)

In a case called New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, the Supreme Court in June struck down concealed carry permitting frameworks in several states that effectively prohibited ordinary Americans from carrying firearms in public for self-defense.

Since then, residents of those states have applied for concealed carry permits in droves, showing just how willing many of them always have been to exercise their Second Amendment rights when the government no longer prohibits it.

Take, for example, New Jersey, a state where only 870 applications for concealed carry permits were filed in 2021, when residents knew that almost no one would be granted such a permit. This year, the state administrative office in charge of permitting expects that 11,000 applications will be submitted by the end of December.

Similarly, Maryland State Police say that in the two weeks after the high court’s Bruen decision, they received over 7,000 concealed carry permit applications—up from just 1,000 during the same period in 2021.

This shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone who understands just how important the right to keep and bear arms is to the safety of Americans.

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 the latest report on the subject by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Just this year, a more comprehensive study concluded that roughly 1.6 million defensive gun uses occur in the United States every year.

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, 2021, and so far in 2022.)

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

Given so many stories such as these, it’s little wonder why, Americans overwhelmingly choose to exercise their Second Amendment rights when given the opportunity to do so.

For too long, states such as New Jersey and Maryland have done everything in their power to limit the ability of law-abiding residents to defend themselves with firearms. Such states shouldn’t be shocked that so many residents now want the concealed carry permits that their states have denied them.

Americans want to defend themselves. They have a constitutional right to do so with firearms.

The best thing the government can do is to get out of their way.

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