In this Saturday, June 29, 2019, photo, Cindy Bullock, Timpanogos Academy secretary, participates in shooting drills at the Utah County Sheriff’s Office shooting range during the teacher’s academy training, in Spanish Fork Canyon, Utah. About 30 teachers in Utah are spending their summer learning how to stuff wounds and shoot guns as part of a training held by police to prepare educators for an active shooter scenario in their schools. (AP Photo/ Rick Bowmer)
Even liberals had to be impressed by West Freeway Church parishioner Jack Wilson’s take-down of the shooter who opened fire during a crowded service. Within seconds of the gunman’s first shot, Wilson ended what would surely have been a massacre with a single shot.
Although the shooter managed to kill two people, it’s impossible to know how many more lives would have ended had Wilson not been armed. Considering there were over 200 people inside the church, the answer is one hell of a lot.
Liberals, in their rush to take away our guns, refuse to look at statistics showing the number of lives saved because of “good guys with guns.” But the numbers are stunning and they need to be shouted from the rafters.
The Bongino Report’s Matt Palumbo compiled a summary of statistics on Self-Defensive Gun Use (SDGU) which I’m reprinting here.
- The National Crime Victimization Survey is administered twice a year by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, and provides the most conservative estimate of SDGU at about 100,000 cases per year. Of note, the survey requires individuals to self-report to the federal government that they used a firearm in self-defense while providing their name and contact information. Most will be hesitant to do so for obvious reasons, so this estimate should be taken as the absolute minimum.
- A 1994 survey conducted by Bill Clinton’s Center for Disease Control (CDC) found that Americans use guns to frighten away intruders who are breaking into their homes about 500,000 times per year.
- Obama’s CDC conducted a gun control study in 2013, finding that “Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million…”
- Criminologists Gary Kleck and Marc Gertz published a study back in 1995 in which they found that gun use accounted more for defensive gun use than it did for criminal activity.” A literature review of thirteen studies in their paper provides a range of between 800,000-2.5 million SDGUs. A follow-on study in 1997 argues that SDGU accounted for more than 80% of all gun use in America.
- CDC survey data from the 1990s that was unpublished but accessed and analyzed in 2018 by Kleck implies roughly 1 million SDGUs per year.
- According to the National Survey of Private Firearms Ownership, there are 1.5 million self-defensive gun uses every year.
- According to a paper by David Kopel, Paul Gallant, and Joanne Eisen, “[F]irearms are used over half a million times a year against home invasion burglars; usually the burglar flees as soon as he finds out that the victim is armed, and no shot is ever fired,” and “Annually, three to six times as many victims successfully defend themselves with handguns as criminals misuse handguns (thus handguns do up to six times more good than harm).”
These figures, as Palumbo notes, are “absolute minimums.” Counting the number of deaths prevented is a bit like estimating the number of pregnancies prevented by use of contraceptives. The sure way to find out how many lives are saved by good guys with guns would be to take those guns away.
Clearly, it would be impossible for the government to confiscate criminals’ guns. Even if they managed to take some, criminals will always find a way to obtain replacements.
That would leave the rest of us at their mercy.
In early December, I posted about an attempted shooting at a high school in Waukesha, WI here. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that a 17-year-old male student had pulled out a handgun in a classroom. The teacher, who had received training, and the school’s armed resource officer (SRO) both acted quickly. The SRO was forced to shoot the student to end the event, however, he did not shoot to kill and the student survived.
This story never made the national news. No one had been killed because the school was prepared for the possibility of such an incident. They trained their teachers and they had an armed school resource officer on the premises.
Liberals need to hear stories like this and they need to be made aware of statistics such as those above.
Sadly, they won’t until a dangerous incident touches their lives.