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11 Instances of Defensive Gun Use Dramatize Wisdom of Second Amendment

A Houston woman working in her family-owned food truck fatally shot an armed man who tried to kill her during a robbery attempt, police say. (Photo illustration: RichLegg/Getty Images)

In recent decades, gun control advocates increasingly have tried to rewrite history by asserting that the Second Amendment—despite its plain text—never was supposed to protect a “right of the people” to keep and bear arms, but rather grants to state governments only the authority to maintain militias.

The latest purveyor of this objectively false narrative is Kris Brown, president of Brady: United Against Gun Violence, a major gun control group formerly known as the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. The organization, founded in 1974 as the National Council to Control Handguns, has never met a Second Amendment restriction that, in its view, goes too far. 

Standing in front of the Lexington Minutemen Memorial in Massachusetts, Brown decried what she called “a false interpretation” of the Second Amendment as protecting an individual right, implying that this historically sound interpretation is inconsistent with “protecting our kids.”

The irony is astounding.

That “well-regulated militia” that assembled at Lexington in 1775 was then, as it is now, composed of ordinary civilians who employed their privately owned firearms in an organized and collective defense of their rights and liberties. And they stood their ground in the first battle of the American Revolution against, quite literally, an attempt to forcibly disarm them

Policymakers who resist burdensome restrictions on the “right of the people to keep and bear arms” do so precisely because they, like our Founders, know that every human being has an unalienable right to self-defense, and that without the practical means to defend themselves and their communities, Americans’ rights are nothing more than dead letters and hopeful wishes. 

And just as it was for our forefathers, the Second Amendment today remains premised on ensuring that we—the people to whom the right belongs—are well-armed against any criminal or tyrant who would victimize us or our children unjustly.

The reality is that today ordinary Americans are as reliant on their Second Amendment rights as they’ve ever been.

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 years.)

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

As a result of these defensive gun uses, many innocent lives no doubt were saved.

Our Founding Fathers recognized the importance of the right to bear arms. They enshrined this principle in our Constitution as a means of ensuring that we could defend ourselves, our families, and our communities against inevitable threats.

Despite modern efforts to rewrite history to suit the needs of gun control advocates, the reality is that for more than 150 years, no serious legal scholar ever questioned that the Second Amendment protects an individual right that is premised not on hunting or sport shooting but on giving practical effect to every human being’s natural and unalienable right to self-defense.

The Founders wouldn’t bat an eye at a citizenry well-armed with modern weapons to defend itself against either tyrant or criminal.

They would be appalled, however, at any suggestion that their armed stand against a gun control scheme is evidence that we, today, should passively accept more restrictions on our right to keep and bear arms.

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