For years, gun control advocates have clung to a now-tired narrative on the costs and benefits of civilian gun ownership. The narrative paints the Second Amendment as the primary cause of an alleged (and seemingly perpetual) “gun violence epidemic,” while insisting that ordinary civilians rarely rely on firearms for self-defense.
Prominent gun control groups like Everytown routinely weaponize this narrative to lament the very existence of the right to keep and bear arms—and to advocate for increasingly severe restrictions on civilian gun ownership.
There’s just one problem: Gun control advocates’ own data tells a very different story.
Earlier this month, Everytown invited American gun owners to attend the group’s online gun safety training classes, which lectured attendees on the fact that defensive gun uses are an “exceedingly rare” phenomenon. Astute gun owners, however, noticed something peculiar—the numbers simply did not add up.
The lecturers insisted, on the one hand, that the nation suffered from a gun violence epidemic because an average of 47,000 Americans died from gunshot wounds annually over the last five years (at least half of those deaths are suicides). Yet, on the other hand, the training materials stated that those supposedly “rare” defensive gun uses occurred at an average of 69,000 times annually since 2019—making them 22% more “common” than the gun deaths allegedly reaching epidemic levels.
In other words, Everytown inadvertently admitted that Second Amendment advocates have been right all along—ordinary Americans routinely rely on the right to keep and bear arms.
Everytown’s numbers are, of course, also extreme outliers in the overall body of research on the prevalence of defensive gun use. Almost every major study—including the most recent report on the subject by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—has found that Americans use their firearms in self-defense between 500,000 and 3 million times annually.
In 2021, a professor at the Georgetown McDonough School of Business conducted the most comprehensive study ever undertaken on the issue, concluding that roughly 1.6 million defensive gun uses occur in the U.S. 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 accounts from past months and years here.)
The examples below represent only a small portion of the news stories on defensive gun use during crimes that we found in October. You can explore more using The Heritage Foundation’s interactive Defensive Gun Use Database.
- Oct. 3, Athens Township, Pennsylvania. A woman and her husband stopped by the home of her ex-husband’s mother for a visit, at her invitation. During the visit, the ex-husband—who also lived in the home—“violently attacked and assaulted” the woman’s current husband. The assailant pinned the husband to the floor, repeatedly punched him in the head, and struck him in the face with a picture frame, inflicting a serious head injury. Fearing for his life, the husband—a concealed carry permit holder—drew his firearm and fatally shot his assailant.
- Oct. 4, San Antonio, Texas. When a masked robber entered a smoke shop late at night and brandished a firearm at an employee, the employee drew his own gun and shot the robber multiple times. The suspect’s wounds ultimately proved fatal, but the employee wasn’t injured.
- Oct. 7, Albany, Louisiana. Police say that a gun owner who shot and wounded a would-be arsonist was legally justified in his actions, noting that the man whom he shot had poured gasoline around a home and was in the process of attempting to set it on fire with someone still inside. The injured suspect faces a charge of attempted aggravated arson.
- Oct. 10, Phoenix, Arizona. A woman fatally shot her ex-boyfriend after he forced his way into her apartment late at night while she and her two children were home. The woman told police that she’d recently ended the relationship.
- Oct. 11, Deltona, Florida. A woman shot and injured her husband in self-defense after he forced his way into the home and assaulted her after she had locked her doors, fearing for her safety during a confrontation. Police arrested the husband, who had a history of violent criminal charges and now faces additional charges of battery, giving false information to law enforcement, and violating his probation.
- Oct. 13, Miami, Florida. Four masked men clad in all-black clothing confronted a woman as she sat in her car in front of her home, pointed a rifle at her, and forced her inside the home at gunpoint. The intruders kicked open a locked bedroom door, only to be met with gunfire from the woman’s boyfriend, who’d armed himself when he heard the commotion. The rounds injured one intruder and sent the others fleeing. The boyfriend successfully detained the injured suspect at gunpoint until police arrived.
- Oct. 16, Chicago, Illinois. A woman exchanged gunfire with two armed intruders who entered her home and assaulted another resident. The suspects fled and neither victim was injured during the shooting.
- Oct. 19, Compton, California. Employees at a beauty supply store asked a man to leave after he allegedly followed a woman into the business and groped her. This enraged the man, who verbally berated employees and threw merchandise around the store before brandishing an object that appeared to be a knife and threatening to kill everyone inside. A female customer drew a gun and first fired a warning shot. When the man turned toward her, however, she fired another round, this time fatally striking him. The armed customer cooperated with investigators and wasn’t arrested.
- Oct. 25, Carson City, Nevada. Local authorities described how a verbal altercation between two men at a gas station took a “bizarre turn” that ended with one of the men being shot in self-defense by a female resident during a home invasion. Apparently, the verbal dispute escalated into a car chase that caused two different hit-and-run accidents before one of the men—for reasons that remain unclear—forced his way into a home occupied by people with no connection to the preceding events.
- Oct. 28, Memphis, Tennessee. A man returned to his mother’s home after being “forcefully removed” during an altercation with her husband. He broke a front glass window, reached inside through the shattered glass, and grabbed his mother by the neck, prompting her husband to shoot and critically injure him in her defense. Police later learned that the son had an active arrest warrant for theft charges.
- Oct. 31, Humble, Texas. An off-duty sheriff’s deputy fatally shot a man who repeatedly tried to enter the deputy’s pick-up truck—where he’d just strapped in his young child—despite multiple commands to stop. The man apparently had a history of serious mental illness and family members said he’d been acting increasingly erratic in the days leading up to the shooting.
The standard gun control narrative is one that collapses under the weight of its own (severely undercounted) data. Everytown can dress up their own contradictions and reframe them as genuine concern, but the numbers give the game away. The truth is simple: Lawful gun ownership benefits ordinary Americans, who routinely rely on their Second Amendment rights to protect life, liberty, and property.