Good Guys (and Gals) With Guns Still Out There, as These 12 Examples Show; Good Guys’ with Guns Save Lives More Often Than Reported; New Polling Shows a Majority of American Households Own Guns and Support Gun Rights

Good Guys (and Gals) With Guns Still Out There, as These 12 Examples Show:

The tragic mass shooting last month in Lewiston, Maine, sent gun control activists into their typical attacks on the right to keep and bear arms. Many defaulted to their standard narrative that the real “bad guy” wasn’t the murderer, but the Second Amendment and its supporters.

Instead of demanding accountability from the government officials who failed to enforce existing criminal and mental health laws, they immediately demanded additional gun control measures that punish ordinary, peaceable Americans.

Even worse, some derided millions of law-abiding gun owners by asserting that the murderer was just another “good guy with a gun” up until the moment he started killing innocent people. Others mocked gun owners by asking where all the “good guys with guns” were to stop the slaughter.

Comments like these, of course, ignore reality. As is the case in so many mass public shootings, the Lewiston gunman was anything but a “good guy,” and he targeted victims in places where he was least likely to be met with armed resistance.

Meanwhile, the fact that the Lewiston shooter wasn’t stopped by an armed civilian doesn’t negate the many other instances last month in which Americans successfully used their firearms to defend themselves, their loved ones, and even complete strangers from criminal violence.

Such defensive gun uses are far from uncommon.

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 months and years. You also may follow @DailyDGU on Twitter for daily highlights of defensive gun uses.)

The 12 examples below represent only a small portion of the news stories on defensive gun use that we found in October. You may explore more using The Heritage Foundation’s interactive Defensive Gun Use Database. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s news organization.) —>READ MORE HERE

Good guys’ with guns save lives more often than reported:

Mercedes Perez crashed her car into another car on a San Antonio street in 2021 and then jumped out with a gun and blazed away at neighbors who came out of their homes to see what happened.

She killed one man, the car’s owner, and wounded his wife and son before another neighbor heard the shooting. He grabbed his gun and ran to the scene, where he killed Perez with a shot to the neck.

John Lott, author, researcher and founder of the Crime Prevention Research Center, said it’s a case of a good guy with a gun stopping a bad guy with a gun.

Yet the incident was left out of the FBI’s database of active shooting incidents.

Lott said it’s one of dozens of such incidents missing from the bureau’s statistics, which he said has fueled a false narrative that rarely do good guys with guns stop shootings.

The FBI says the rate of active shooting incidents ended by good guys with guns is 4.4% over the years. Lott says it’s 34.4%.

The FBI’s conclusions are widely cited, particularly as new shootings revive old debates about gun control and whether more access to weapons is safer or more dangerous.

When an armed citizen does intervene and it draws national headlines — as happened at an Indiana mall food court last year — news accounts are quick to point to the FBI’s findings as evidence that it’s a rarity. The FBI’s numbers also have been used in court cases, and they pepper legislative debates on Capitol Hill and in state assemblies. —>READ MORE HERE

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+++++New Polling Shows a Majority of American Households Own Guns and Support Gun Rights+++++

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