How often do Americans use guns in lawful self-defense? It’s a difficult question to answer, in part because many who send a criminal to flight by merely demonstrating they are armed, never report the incident. The same is true for many who brandish their handguns, or even point them at criminals, instantly convincing them running for their lives is the better part of valor.

Refusing to report is surely common in blue states, where law-abiding citizens can be virtually certain if they report lawful self-defense, they’re far more likely than the criminal that forced them to defend themselves to be arrested and prosecuted. Even in red states, many don’t want to take the chance.

Graphic: Glock 19, Author.

Another factor that has become obvious during the Biden administration is as many as 7,000 police agencies—surely most if not all blue—have stopped reporting crimes, particularly violent crimes. This represents about a 35% reduction in the number of cities reporting crimes. No reports of crime, no crime exists, and leftists can claim huge reductions in violent crime even as they decriminalize crime and refuse to prosecute criminals.

There have, however, been a number of studies whose results are revealing. The Clinton administration conducted such a study, secure in their belief the results would conclusively prove lawful self-defense with guns was rare, a result they planned to use in pushing even more gun control schemes. To their horror, they found as many as 1.5 million such cases per year. They tried to hide the result, but it eventually leaked. Another study, which, to the horror of anti-liberty/gun cracktivists has stood the test of time and every attack, indicates as many as 2.5 million defensive gun uses per year, and in only 8% of those cases, was it necessary to shoot the criminal attacker. In 82% of cases, merely revealing a handgun and/or demonstrating the will to use it were sufficient to end an attack. In such cases, we can never know if the criminal was intent on robbery, rape, kidnapping or even murder.

The Centers For Disease Control have long been prohibited by law from using taxpayer dollars to advocate for gun control, which has not, of course, stopped them. A recent CDC report has been revealed to be ridiculously unprofessional and invalid. Conducted entirely by telephone, it had these four primary problems:  

Graphic: Screenshot, public domain.

1. They were unable to determine whether firearms were stored loaded or unloaded during the phone interviews. 

2. They were only able to obtain data from the eight states, which is statistically meaningless. 

3. Some respondents did not want to disclose whether they had a firearm in their home. 

This is surely a major factor in that Americans have never been more mistrustful of the government, particularly when speaking about gun ownership.

4. All of the data was self-reported to the researchers, and therefore “subject to social desirability and recall biases.”

One might also wonder why the CDC, which is ostensibly supposed to be dealing with disease vectors, should be spending time and money on an incompetently done telephone survey about gun storage in the home. As one might imagine, the survey ignored lawful defensive gun uses, the need for which is one of the primary reasons Americans keep firearms in their homes. By the way, the CDC was forced to admit the aforementioned flaws.

Why would anyone want to suppress the truth about lawful, defensive gun uses? They do irreparable damage to the anti-liberty/gun narrative, which holds guns are inherently evil,  and so are those who own them. They have the mystical power to compel their owners to murder. Guns exist only to kill the innocent—that would be leftist favored victim groups--and far fewer people own guns than the “gun lobby” claims, yet guns are everywhere, are responsible for unimaginable carnage and must be banned. Despite there being few guns, anyone owning a gun is virtually certain to kill a family member, despite firearm accidents being at a 100 year+ low.

There’s no logic or reproducible results supporting anti-liberty/gun “research,” which is why those that advocate that position simply resort to lying, which lies are eagerly and uncritically trumpeted by most of the media. Fortunately, Americans have wised up. For nearly 60 consecutive months, they’ve bought more than a million guns a month. They may not be willing to tell the government how many guns they own or how they use them, but they’re more than willing to use them to protect their families, and if necessary, to preserve our representative republic.

That’s what really scares our self-imagine elite.

Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, life-long athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer and high school and college English teacher. He is a published author and blogger. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.