Editors’ Note: The collection of data is important to policy. Just as temperatures taken from heat islands can lead climatologists to wrong conclusions about “global warming”, so can incorrect data on the use of firearms can mislead policymakers. Professor John Lott is perhaps one of the best independent sources of information relating to firearms. Recently, he wrote in Real Clear Investigations:

“Evidence compiled by the organization I run, the Crime Prevention Research Center, and others suggest that the FBI undercounts by an order of more than three the number of instances in which armed citizens have thwarted such attacks, saving untold numbers of lives. Although those many news stories about the Greenwood shooting also suggested that the defensive use of guns might endanger others, there is no evidence that these acts have harmed innocent victims.”

“So much of our public understanding of this issue is malformed by this single agency,” notes Theo Wold, former acting assistant attorney general in the U.S. Department of Justice. “When the Bureau gets it so systematically – and persistently – wrong, the cascading effect is incredibly deleterious. The FBI exerts considerable influence over state and local law enforcement and policymakers at all levels of government.”

We will leave it to our readers and Mike Pence as to why FBI data is so consistently wrong.

*****

I testified before Congress’ Joint Economic Committee last month in a hearing focused on “the economic toll of gun violence.”

Of course, there’s no doubt that gun violence imposes a tremendous cost on society, both financially and in far less readily calculable ways. How does one measure, for example, the mental and emotional toll of being shot?

As I explained to the committee, however, lawful gun owners are not largely to blame for these costs, despite many insinuations to the contrary by gun control advocates. Most lawful gun owners never will harm themselves or others and never will add a single dollar to the overall bill for gun violence.

Meanwhile, lawful gun ownership provides significant but often underacknowledged protective benefits, enabling peaceable citizens to defend themselves and others far more effectively than if they were unarmed.

Almost every major study on the issue 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.

For this reason, The Daily Signal each month publishes an 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 other accounts here from 2019, 2020, 2021, and so far in 2022.)

The examples below represent only a small portion of the news stories on defensive gun use that we found in July. You may explore more by using The Heritage Foundation’s interactive Defensive Gun Use Database. (The Daily Signal is Heritage’s multimedia news organization.)

• July 3, Surprise, Arizona: An armed citizen fatally shot a gunman who opened fire at a neighborhood Fourth of July gathering, police said. Witnesses said the gunman lived in the neighborhood and had engaged in small talk and eaten a plate of food before drawing a handgun and shooting those around him. He killed two and wounded four others before being fatally shot by the armed citizen. Police said they thought the gunman’s actions were unprovoked, but didn’t know his motive.
• July 5, Houston: A woman was barbecuing with friends when her adult son showed up drinking and acting strangely, police said. The woman and her son went inside, where the son grabbed a rifle and fired more than 20 rounds at his mother before she fled outside. The son chased her, but was fatally shot by an armed neighbor who heard the gunfire and came to the woman’s defense, police said. The mother suffered multiple gunshot wounds, but was expected to survive. No one else was injured.
• July 7, Pensacola, Florida: A local sheriff told reporters that a homeowner would “absolutely not” face charges for using an “AK-47-style” rifle to defend his home against three men who broke in and threatened him with a handgun. Police arrested two of the three men, one of whom was the subject of several active arrest warrants for violent crimes. Police were looking for a third man, who apparently was wounded.
• July 12, Chicago: Police said that the holder of a concealed carry permit turned the tables on a teenager who started shooting at him in a restaurant parking lot. The man drew his own gun and shot his assailant in the hand and foot.
• July 17, Greenwood, Indiana: A 22-year-old man with a concealed carry permit fatally shot a would-be mass shooter who opened fire in a crowded mall food court, police said. The gunman killed three people, but the permit holder saved countless lives by ending the shooting just 15 seconds after it began. Experts roundly praised the permit holder’s marksmanship after he hit the gunman with eight out of 10 rounds from 40 yards away, without any police or military training.
• July 19, Kansas City, Missouri: Authorities said that a man won’t face charges after shooting and wounding an assailant who attacked him and his mother with a machete in a hardware store parking lot. The man and his mother were sitting in their vehicle when the assailant approached and began shattering car windows with the machete. He then swung the blade at them as they tried to escape. Although injured, the man managed to fire at least five rounds at the assailant, who ran a short distance before collapsing. Police charged him with several felonies.
• July 22, Billings, Montana: Police said a man asked a hotel guest for a cigarette, then tried to rob him at knifepoint despite the fact that the guest openly carried a handgun. The guest drew the gun and shot the would-be robber when he lunged.
• July 25, Williamsburg, Virginia: A homeowner and his family were sitting on their porch when an unknown man jumped a gate and approached, police said. The family went inside and locked the door, but the man tried to kick down the door and force his way inside. The homeowner fatally shot the intruder, police said.
• July 27, Wichita, Kansas: A couple briefly left their SUV unattended in their driveway, only to discover upon their return that the car had been stolen—with their two young children still inside. Police said the man and woman called 911 while starting a frantic search. They quickly found the stolen SUV and held the teen driver at gunpoint until police arrived. Bystanders found the children unharmed two blocks away, left on the side of the road while strapped into their car seats. Police arrested three others, all younger than 18 and suspected of being involved in “numerous other crimes.”
• July 29, Indianapolis: Just days after burglars “ransacked” his home, police said, a homeowner found himself again targeted by criminals. This time, he was home and armed when someone broke in, and he fatally shot the intruder. It was the second time the homeowner had used armed force to defend his home. In 2014, he shot and wounded another intruder, who was arrested. The homeowner told reporters that “you shouldn’t have to be armed inside of your house,” but that he hopes would-be criminals learn their lesson.
• July 31, Norco, California: An elderly liquor store owner was manning the counter early in the morning when he saw on his security monitors that a man armed with a rifle was about to enter the store. The store owner grabbed his own shotgun and the second the armed man aimed a  rifle to announce a  robbery, he fired a single blast that sent the robber fleeing while screaming, “He shot my arm off!” Police later arrested the wounded man and three other suspects. Although the store owner was not injured during the incident, he had a heart attack shortly afterward and is now recovering.

As these examples underscore, lawful gun owners save lives and protect livelihoods. They routinely interrupt criminal activity and stop bad situations from becoming even worse. Significant evidence indicates that the threat of armed resistance deters many criminals from committing crimes in the first place.

And in this way, lawfully armed civilians help reduce the costs imposed on society by criminal actors.

Lawful gun owners are not a significant part of the problem of gun violence. The evidence shows, however, that they are part of the solution.

*****

This article was published by Daily Signal and is reproduced with permission.

Editors’ Note: Not much is known about the heroic young man who used his concealed weapon to stop a mass shooter.  More will likely come out fairly soon. Was he violating mall policy to have the weapon on him? If so, thank heavens he violated that silly requirement. It never seems to dawn on Progressives that the reason so few citizens stop mass shootings is that almost all mass shootings are in gun-free zones, which discourages good people from stopping criminals. But it never stops criminals because if you are about to murder innocents, who would care about violating some gun-free sign? Even that said, stopping 5% or more of such tragedies is significant. Moreover, this young man is one hell of a shot.  News reports so far do not indicate he had military or police experience, but rather learned to shoot with his grandfather. Making a 40-yard shot, hitting no bystanders with a 9mm pistol, and hitting the target 8 of 10 times under pressure as people are being killed, and under severe time constraints is almost an Olympian feat.  It would appear that a sick, cowardly young man, was stopped by a heroic young man. We should ignore the former and give due praise to the latter.

The evidence shows that an armed citizen is more likely to stop a mass shooting than any of the policies being advocated by Democrats.

After Eli Dickens stopped a mass shooter this weekend at an Indiana mall, left-leaning outlets began churning out pieces arguing that “good guys with guns” are rare. Now, I don’t know a single pro-gun advocate who claims constitutional carry is a panacea. The nihilistic mass-shooter problem is crying out for a holistic societal remedy. There is no one solution. But it’s clear from the very statistics offered in pieces like this one from the New York Times (which generously quotes me) that concealed carry saves lives.

Consider:

1. Eli Dicken is an absolute badass. The 22-year-old reportedly took down the shooter with eight of 10 shots just 15 seconds after the incident began from 40 yards, showing more bravery and composure than the hundreds of cops milling around while students were being slaughtered in a Uvalde school.

2. The only reason Dicken was armed with a 9-millimeter at the Greenwood mall is that Indiana had recently passed a permitless carry law, which removed license requirements for handgun carriers (though gun buyers still go through the usual FBI background check, a fact omitted in many news stories.) One can assume that Dicken would not have brought any weapon with him had it been illegal to do so, but that the killer, Jonathan Douglas Sapirman, would have shown up with his 100 rounds, two ARs, and a pistol regardless of how forcefully the signs in the mall informed him that he was in a gun-free zone.

3. The New York Times refers to Dicken’s shooting as a “statistical unicorn.” But is it? “An examination of 433 active shooter attacks in the United States between 2000 and 2021,” writes the Times, “showed that only 22 ended with a bystander shooting an attacker, according to data from the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State University.”

Only 22 of 433 incidents is 5 percent — which translates to a significant number of lives saved. Or, put it this way: The lives saved by bystanders taking down shooters are as, or more, effective than any Democrat-led policy effort on gun safety.

When The Washington Post fact-checkers looked at 41 of the most deadly mass shooting since 2015, they could come up with only two instances where “universal background checks” might have averted a shooting. The Post’s claim is debatable in both instances because unlike the shooters who are killed by bystanders, we have no idea what alternative actions would-be mass shooters might take. But, for the sake of argument, let’s concede that “universal background checks” stopped just under 5 percent of the worst mass shootings (there is no reason to believe the percentage rises with bigger sample size). Would the Times categorize the policy’s effectiveness as a “statistical unicorn”? Unlikely.

4. But even the Times’ 5 percent number is misleading. Many, probably most, planned mass shootings happen in places where citizens are forbidden by law to carry guns for self-protection. How many of these rampages would be stopped — or more quickly ended — if teachers or movie theater patrons or mallgoers were allowed to legally carry weapons? The number is surely more than 5 percent. Maybe a lot more.

5. Adam Skaggs, chief counsel, and policy director at Giffords, told the Times that good guys with guns are “exceedingly rare” and “the exception rather than the rule. The reality is that more people carrying guns means more conflicts escalating into deadly violence and more people being shot and killed.”

That is not the reality. There is little correlation between high levels of gun ownership and criminality. There are counties where gun ownership is widespread and there is little criminality, and there are urban areas where the percentage of gun ownership is low and there is exceedingly high criminality, and there are places with low gun ownership and low criminality. But the reality is guns exist in this country. Hundreds of millions of them. Society should be incentivizing responsible ownership and punishing irresponsible ownership. The fact that we strip people of the ability to protect themselves is indefensible.

*****

This article was published by The Federalist and is reproduced with permission.

By a 6-3 decision in N.Y. State Rifle & Pistol Assn. v. Bruen, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a New York law that allowed government officials to pick and choose which class of citizens were deemed worthy of self-protection.

Affirming that the Second Amendment “right to bear arms in public for self-defense is not a second-class right,” the Court ruled that individuals do not have to demonstrate some special need to the government for approval before exercising any other constitutional rights. In an amicus brief, The Rutherford Institute argued that the fundamental rights enshrined in the Constitution must be available to all law-abiding citizens and not parceled out at the whim of government bureaucrats.

Affiliate attorneys Michael J. Lockerby, Eli L. Evans, W. Bradley Russell, Jr., A.J. Salomone, and John Sepehri of Foley & Lardner LLP assisted in advancing the arguments in N.Y. State Rifle & Pistol Assn.

“When considered in the context of prohibitions against the government, the Second Amendment reads as a clear rebuke against any attempt to restrict the citizenry’s gun ownership. As such, it is as necessary an ingredient for maintaining that tenuous balance between the citizenry and their republic as any of the other amendments in the Bill of Rights, especially the right to freedom of speech, assembly, press, petition, security, and due process,” said constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead, president of The Rutherford Institute and author of Battlefield America: The War on the American People. “In this way, the freedoms enshrined in the Bill of Rights in their entirety stand as a bulwark against a police state.”

In response to the influx of European immigrants into the Northeast and New York City in particular, New York State enacted the Sullivan Law in 1911, which made it unlawful to possess a firearm anywhere without a license and gave government officials broad discretion to decide who could obtain one. The law, which was used to deny immigrants in the early 20^th century the ability to possess firearms, had remained on the books. New York State residents are required to have a license to possess a firearm and are entitled to a license unless good cause is shown. However, under the law, even persons with a license could not carry a firearm outside their home unless they obtain another license to do so, and then only if they could show “proper cause” for carrying a gun outside the home. Licensing officials had broad discretion to determine who had “proper cause” for a license to carry outside the home, requiring applicants to show they had a “special need” for self-protection. Two state residents applied for a license to carry a firearm for self-defense outside the home, citing a string of robberies and crimes where they lived. However, they were denied a carry license because they did not show a “special need” for self-protection that was different from other members of the general public. These residents and a state association representing firearms owners challenged the law, asserting that it violated the Second Amendment by requiring persons to show “proper cause” for carrying a firearm outside their home. The lower federal courts dismissed the lawsuit, ruling that the Second Amendment does not protect the right to possess a firearm outside of the home. However, the U.S. Supreme Court reversed those decisions and held that New York’s “proper cause” requirement violated the Second Amendment by preventing law-abiding citizens from carrying handguns publicly outside their homes for self-defense.

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This article was published by The Rutherford Institute and is reproduced with permission.