Media Ignores Examples Where Guns Saved Lives

Guns don’t kill. They’re tools. They have no volition of their own. It takes a murderous heart to kill someone who isn’t trying to hurt you. Without that, we have no problem at all.

But some insist that yes, guns kill. That includes an awful lot of people in the media who push the narrative that guns kill.

What’s funny, though, is how they highlight all the ways they say guns can kill, but they completely ignore it when guns save lives.

Obviously, John Lott doesn’t.

Writing at TheBlaze, he brings receipts regarding what the media does or, more accurately, doesn’t do.

A stabbing at a Michigan Walmart on Saturday was stopped by an armed man — a Marine veteran — who went to the shooting range but “forgot to take his pistol off his hip.”

The New York Times, Associated Press, Washington Post, NPR, NBC News, BBC, and many others completely ignored the gun used to stop the attack. An eyewitness described how others who had tried to stop the attacker were stabbed, but it took the Marine with a gun to stop the attack.

The attack was stopped several minutes before the first responders were able to arrive. One thought is that this hero might get some coverage in the legacy media simply because he is black and the attacker was white.

A disturbing pattern

This case was far from unusual. Between January 2021 and December 2024, concealed handgun permit holders stopped 37 attacks that police said would have turned into mass public shootings if not for their intervention. But they rarely get national news attention.

Lott goes on to note that when it comes to armed security, things are a little different.

When we remember the Buffalo shooting, an armed security officer was one of the first people killed by the gunman. That happened again in Manhattan just recently.

It seems that’s kind of the norm, according to Lott.

Two of the four people murdered in the New York City attack were security guards. But people don’t appreciate the extremely difficult job uniformed police have in stopping these active shooting attacks. “A deputy in uniform has a difficult job in stopping these attacks,” said Sheriff Kurt Hoffman in Sarasota County, Florida. He continues:

These terrorists have strategic advantages in determining the time and place of attacks. They can wait for a deputy to leave the area or pick an undefended location. Even when police or deputies are in the right place at the right time, those in uniform who can be readily identified as guards may as well be holding up neon signs saying, “Shoot me first.” My deputies know that we cannot be everywhere.

In fact, even though civilians stop more of these active shooting attacks than police officers, the men in blue still pay a steep price. Nineteen police officers were killed in these attacks versus two civilians with permitted concealed handguns. It’s little surprise why surveys of academics who have published peer-reviewed empirical research on firearms show that criminologists and economists strongly support letting people carry concealed handguns to stop mass public shootings.

Let’s understand that many of these killers plan their rampages to an incredible degree. They often know that there’s an armed security guard or police officer present and act accordingly. That means killing these good people who are only trying to protect the public.

What they don’t account for, though, is some random guy or gal pulling out a handgun and putting rounds toward them. Even if they don’t hit, it scrambles their brain a bit.

A while back, I spoke with our own Ryan Petty about mass shootings. We’d both lost people we cared about to them, and he’d learned a great deal about the Parkland shooting, where his daughter Aliana was killed. It seems the gunman there had a plan, after his initial rampage, to take up a sniper position and to kill more kids as they exited the building. Unfortunately for him, the glass there was designed to withstand hurricanes. It was essentially bulletproof.

Because his plan was upset, he didn’t pivot. He didn’t know how to. He meticulously planned his attack, but he didn’t meticulously train to adjust. So, instead of doing something different, he just gave up, walked outside, and got arrested.

Something similar can happen when mass killers find themselves meeting armed resistance they didn’t plan on.

And that’s assuming the good guy with a gun doesn’t kill them outright.

They know about the police. They don’t know about the good guy with a gun and can’t plan accordingly.

If guns can kill, then it’s clear they can save lives. The problem is that the media doesn’t want people to know that, so the incident in Michigan never made the big news outlets.

After all, if people find out guns aren’t evil, they might decide banning them is a terrible idea.

They can’t have that.

Editor’s Note: The mainstream media continues to deflect, gaslight, spin, and lie about gun owners and our Second Amendment rights. 

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