Don’t Let Anti-Gun Media Downplay Real Acts of Self-Defense

To hear the anti-gunners talk, you’d think that no one ever uses a gun in self-defense. Never mind that there seem to be somewhere around 300,000 to 500,000 so-called gun crimes, depending on what you include,while there are two to three times as many acts of self-defense each year.

But you don’t hear about those all that much.

Writing over at our sister site, PJ Media, Amy Swearer has highlighted some of the ones that made it into the news, just not the national media, but she also had some things to say before she got to them that are worth taking a look at.

A quick look at state legislative sessions across the country shows it’s clearly that time of year again for gun control advocates. Like the critters in a game of Whack-A-Mole, proposals to further restrict the right to keep and bear arms are popping up for consideration in state after state, needing to be (metaphorically) bopped back down by defenders of the Second Amendment.

As I recently explained to Minnesota state legislators, gun control advocates’ preferred policies do little more than scapegoat peaceable and lawful gun owners while completely missing the point — most violent crimes are committed by a small subset of repeat offenders who are already prohibited from owning any guns, at all. Those criminals aren’t likely to comply with new laws making it doubly illegal for them to possess a certain type of firearm. Even then, it wouldn’t matter because criminals could just as easily use “featureless” versions of the same guns (which, again, they still can’t lawfully possess) to carry out their crimes. 

At the same time, gun control advocates often downplay (or even outright ignore) the fact that law-abiding Americans routinely rely on their right to keep and bear arms to defend themselves and others from actual violent criminals who ignore gun control restrictions. A 2013 report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention acknowledged that almost every study on the issue has found that between 500,000 and several million defensive gun uses occur every year in the United States. An extensive 2021 national survey conducted by a Georgetown professor further substantiated this reality, concluding that Americans used their firearms defensively an average of 1.2 million times a year.

In short, self-defense happens more than offensive gun use, but you’d be forgiven for not knowing that because so few people are willing to mention it. Swearer includes a number of examples from February, which you should check out, but she also points out that many times, there’s not even a shot fired and no police report filed because there’s no reason to.

I’ve been unfortunate enough to have to draw my weapon out of fear for my life or someone else’s twice. I didn’t have to pull the trigger either time, thankfully, but while the police were called in both instances, there was no report of my having drawn a weapon. How many millions of others are in the same boat?

The reality is that defensive gun uses happen all the time. Good guys with guns stop bad guys with guns, but the media largely ignores it. Part of that is the ironic fact that it’s so common that it just doesn’t register with people. They hear about what happened and immediately dismiss it, never really putting together that they’ve heard of a lot of these kinds of things so often, but have stopped thinking about them.

Then the media feeds into the idea that guns are for killing innocent people, and suddenly that’s what they latch onto. They’ve already dismissed all of those individual reports as meaningless, but the media is throwing larger numbers at them, and that makes an impression.

Why is that? Why do you think the media would largely ignore the total number of defensive gun uses but harp on so-called gun crime?

Don’t worry, the media reported there was no media bias, so it’s all good.

Editor’s Note: The mainstream media continues to lie about gun owners and the Second Amendment. 

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