You see the headlines every day. “4 Shot in Altercation”, “3 Wounded in Robbery Attempt”, but for every crime committed with a gun, dozens more are prevented by a gun by defensive gun use.
“Having a gun is by far the safest course of action when people are facing a criminal by themselves,” Dr. John Lott tells Fox News in an in-depth interview.
Lott, an economist and president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, also tells Fox that women, who often are passive when being victimized by criminals are, “about 2.4 times more likely to end up being seriously injured than a woman who has a gun to protect herself.”
You only need to look at the increasing amounts of violent crime in the country’s largest cities to see the advantages of being legally armed. “Thank God I had my gun or I’d probably be dead right now,” said a Chicago woman who has obtained a concealed carry permit.
Last October, she defended herself from two carjackers who approached her outside of a bank.
Dr. Lott says that around 2,000 cases of self-defense with a gun are reported every year, but that is a tiny fraction of the total. “The vast majority of successful self-defense cases do not make the news.”
Lott also reports that, according to the results of national surveys, approximately 2 million defensive guns uses per year.
The Heritage Foundation, which began their own database to track defensive gun uses, claims that according to CDC statistics, the number of times Americans use a gun defensively could be as high as 3 million.
“The reality is, I think this number shocks a lot of people,” Amy Swearer, a legal fellow in the Meese Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the Heritage Foundation said to Fox News in an interview.
Quoting two studies that minimize the amount of defensive gun use, Swearer says that even these “outliers” prove that guns are used in self-defense, “tens of thousands of times every year.”
Dr. Lott believes that the reason for the vast underreporting of successful gun defenses lies in the fact that most cases don’t result in injuries. “Ninety-five percent of defensive gun uses involve merely brandishing a gun, and less than 1% involve the attacker being killed or wounded,” Lott says.
“Most news stories only report on cases where attackers are killed and brandishing are ignored. It is understandable that someone getting killed is more newsworthy than a woman brandishing a gun and the criminal running away without committing a crime, but from a policy perspective we care about both cases.”
It is that effect that has led to a huge spike in new gun ownership as well as a large increase in concealed carry permits. A study conducted by The Crime Prevention Research Center released this past October shows that in 2020 concealed carry permits shot up to 21.52 million permits nationwide, an increase of 10.5% since 2016.
It isn’t just white males carrying either. Dr. Lott says that last year, “women made up 28.3% of permit holders in the 14 states that provide data by gender,” and permits being held by Black Americans shot up 135.7% faster than their White peers.
“The people who benefit most from owning guns are also the ones who are the most likely victims of violent crime – poor Blacks who live in high crime urban areas.” Dr. Lott adds. “Over 92% of violent crime has nothing to do with guns.”
