Counting the Uncountable Lives Saved by Good Guys with Guns

We know your armed neighbor protected himself when he scared away the robber in the night. What we don’t know, and often can’t know, is how many other people your neighbor saved that night. It is devilishly hard to measure the good that armed citizens do as they stop violent crime. Sure, we have a pretty good idea how many people own guns. We have a very good idea how many times these gun owners save lives every year. What we don’t know very well is how many violent attacks they prevented. Sure, we can come up with a number, but this is why that simple question of lives saved is so difficult to answer.

The good news is that we are far better at this than we used to be. To begin, there was a nationwide survey in early 2021 that asked tens of thousands of people if they owned guns. The researchers came up with a figure of about 81 million people over the age of 18 who own firearms in the USA. That certainly tells us some of what we want to know, but it isn’t nearly enough. In the same way that you might have a driver’s license and drive regularly but still not be a car owner yourself, we don’t know how many people routinely have access to a firearm for self-defense but are not themselves a gun owner today. Maybe they owned guns yesterday, but not now. We know that about four-in-ten of us live in a household that owns guns.

To confuse matters even more, maybe your roommate owns a gun so you can defend yourself at night when you’re home, but it is much less likely that you could protect yourself when you’re away from your apartment. Does that mean you count as “half a gun owner” if you only have a firearm nearby for half of each day? Since this nationwide survey only questioned gun owners, that means the “armed roommates”, and the “armed family members” were ignored. They may have used a firearm in self-defense or they might not.

The survey researchers only asked gun owners if they defended themselves. Despite those conservative conditions, the survey found that over 25-million ordinary adults used a firearm for self-defense at some point in their lives. That alone is a significant number of lives that were saved from “death or grave bodily injury.” The researchers also came up with a figure of 1.67-million times each year when gun owners used a firearm in self-defense.

Those are very important numbers, but again we want to know more about what they imply. We know how many armed incidents we had, but we don’t know how many good guys were saved in each incident. Those numbers matter because armed defense is so common. We defend ourselves with a firearm over 4,600 times a day.

Was your neighbor alone in her home when she frightened away the robber last night? Shouldn’t we count her family members or roommates as being saved with a gun too? How about the passengers who were riding with you when you frightened away the carjacker by reaching for your handgun? Unfortunately, the firearms survey didn’t ask about the number of victims who were defended. The answer is neither obvious nor certain.

It is hard to know how many people were put at risk by the robbers who tried to rob the local restaurant. Were the cooks in the back room at risk to the same degree as the female clerk behind the cash register who had the criminal’s gun in her face? The defender knows much more about the number of attackers in front of him than the potential victims who were behind him. On average, the defender faced more than one attacker, but we don’t know how many people she defended.

We think there were a total of about 2.5 million attacks that were stopped by armed defenders. At a minimum, that means we saved about 3-million individuals during the attack.

While the number of victims who were saved that day is important, it is also important to count the much larger number of victims who were saved tomorrow.

Violent crime is localized. 52-percent of our counties won’t have even a single murder this year. In contrast, there are a few criminals who will commit most of our violent crimes each year. 56-percent, over half of our murders, are committed in the worst 2 percent of our counties. Stopping those few violent predators today can make all of us much safer for years to come.

They used to say that the average criminal committed 20 to 30 crimes before he was arrested and taken off the streets. That could mean that the gun owner who helps stop an armed criminal would save an additional 10 to 15 people from being injured in the next few weeks or months. That used to be true, but what if the criminals aren’t being arrested by law enforcement in your city? What if these violent predators are not prosecuted and then sentenced?

The crime-closure rate has fallen and the effect is particularly pronounced in our failing democrat-controlled cities. In many cities with Soros funded prosecutors, carjackings are not being prosecuted, even armed carjackings. That is particularly true if the carjacker was a young man or young woman. The police might not want to investigate a residential burglary unless the criminal is still in your home. You’re supposed to file the crime report online.

The role of the armed defender becomes more important as the police stop capturing criminals and judges stop putting them in jail.

I have studied thousands of news stories about armed defense. Most of the time when the criminal faces an armed victim, the criminal runs away. The armed defender is forced to press the trigger about 18-percent of the time. Sometimes the criminal presses his attack and is wounded by the armed defender. Sometimes the attacker is killed. We’d rather that the police capture the criminal before the robber ever makes it to our door, but we don’t always get what we want.

If the police caught every criminal after every crime, then the armed defender is only saving himself and his family. In contrast, the armed citizen may be saving a dozen future victims if the criminal justice system is broken, and the offender commits crime after crime.

As a case in point, it is common for an injured robber to show up at the hospital for treatment. The robber is often arrested when he matches the description of the violent attacker who broke into your home. If the wounded robbers are put in jail then that means that the armed defenders are saving a few million more people each year.

There isn’t one answer that works to describe the number of victims saved by each armed defense. In hindsight, we should have expected that from the beginning.

Taking the criminal off the street pushes the number of individuals who were saved by armed defense each year to over 5-million people. No wonder our failed democrat cities are so violent when they have all but outlawed armed defense.

That armed defense is only marginally important in a well-run society. Sadly, we are now seeing cities where violent crime goes unrecorded and unstopped. In those sad situations, armed defenders are saving their own lives and the lives of the next victims. By matter of degree, that is true in every city.

The beneficiaries are hard to count, but honest gun owners save several millions of lives in addition to their own.