The Daily Signal Looks at March Defensive Gun Uses

A lot of people like to pretend that defensive gun uses aren’t very common. These are, of course, the same people who claim mass shootings are happening every minute of every day, but defensive gun uses are supposedly rare.

The best way to combat that is to track just how many of those we can find.

Most of us don’t have the resources to follow all of that, nor do we have the time. Luckily, the Heritage Foundation’s The Daily Signal has more of that than most of us do, and they posted a piece about March’s defensive gun uses. This isn’t an exhaustive list, of course, but it’s still telling.

Almost every major study has found that Americans use their firearms in self-defense between 500,000 and 3 million times annually, according to the most recent report on the subject by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2021, a professor at the Georgetown McDonough School of Business conducted the most comprehensive study ever on the issue, and 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 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 March. You may explore more by using The Heritage Foundation’s interactive Defensive Gun Use Database.

• March 2, Houston, Texas: Police say that three armed teens broke into the home of a well-known online influencer and demanded access to her cryptocurrency account at gunpoint—allegedly pistol-whipping her out of frustration. Eventually, the woman led the intruders toward her husband, who was armed and waiting in a different part of the house. The husband opened fire at the intruders as they approached, wounding one and sending them all fleeing. Police tracked down and apprehended the suspects within several days, and they are now each charged with aggravated kidnapping and aggravated robbery. 
• March 4, Lake City, Florida: A former MMA fighter broke into the home of a person who had an active restraining order against him and “rushed” toward a resident in a threatening manner. Someone inside the home fatally shot the man in self-defense. Several children and adults were home at the time, but none appears to have been injured. 
• March 9, Channelview, Texas: After weeks of escalation, a man with a history of stalking and making threats tried to break into his ex-girlfriend’s home while armed with a handgun. The woman’s current boyfriend—who also lived at the home—grabbed his own firearm and fatally shot the armed would-be intruder before he could harm anyone.
• March 10, Chesterfield County, Virginia: Police say that a woman shot and wounded her boyfriend in self-defense after he assaulted and strangled her during a domestic violence incident. The boyfriend was charged with strangulation and domestic assault.

Amy Swearer is the author of the above, and she also refers to the FSU shooting because, well, you kind of have to.

I’m just going to point out, though, that the FSU shooting could well have been on this list if Florida weren’t so restrictive with regard to gun rights. A campus carry bill, especially one coupled with allowing legal adults under 21 to carry, might well have changed the entire nature of what happened last week.

Good guys with guns aren’t everywhere, but the fact that bad guys don’t know if they’re present or not means they’re less likely to pick places where people may be armed.

Florida State might never have happened if the alleged killer had to consider the possibility of armed resistance right away, especially since he wasn’t suicidal.

I’m not saying a shooting wouldn’t have happened, but it wouldn’t have happened there, and with fewer gun-free zones available with large numbers of people, it might have made him consider doing literally anything else with his time instead.

Gun rights are human rights.

Guns save lives.

The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.

They’re all slogans, but they’re all true.