Amy Swearer, a legal fellow with The Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies and a writer who has contributed to America’s 1st Freedom many times, noticed that the gun-control group Everytown inadvertently admitted that lawfully armed citizens stop a lot of crimes in America.
Defensive gun uses (DGU)—lawfully armed citizen using a gun to stop crimes—have long been a reality check to gun-control groups’ claims. These groups want people to believe that gun ownership leads to crimes, and worse, even as large studies have consistently shown that lawfully armed citizens often use their firearms for self-defense purposes.
In a recent example, for the crime of running a huge survey on defensive gun use in the U.S. that was not forced into the narrative structure of today’s gun-control activism, William English, an assistant professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, was subpoenaed, attacked in The New York Times and by many other “mainstream” outlets and, basically, pilloried in the press in order to, as he put it in The Wall Street Journal in 2024, “warn off other academics thinking of doing similar research, and to influence courts where states are losing on the merits.”
English, of course, supervised the 2021 National Firearms Survey. Data from the survey of 54,000 American adults estimated that citizens use their guns defensively about 1.67 million times annually; and, indeed, the survey found that “in most defensive incidents (81.9%) no shot was fired.”
To gun-control activists in politics and the media, this finding had to be marginalized, shunned, cancelled and chased from polite society. They don’t want people to know that law-abiding Americans do need their freedom.
Yet now, as Swearer reported, Everytown just admitted that armed citizens do often use their guns for self-defense.
“Everytown invited American gun owners to attend the group’s online gun safety training classes, which lectured attendees on the fact that defensive gun uses are an ‘exceedingly rare’ phenomenon. Astute gun owners, however, noticed something peculiar—the numbers simply did not add up,” wrote Swearer.
While arguing that America suffers from an epidemic of violence because so many citizens are armed, Everytown’s “training materials” claimed that supposedly “rare” DGUs happen about 69,000 times annually.
While 69,000 is a statistical outlier when compared to actual studies, it is still a big number. What reasonable person would call 69,000 DGUs annually in the U.S. rare?
“Almost every major study—including the most recent report on the subject by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention—has found that Americans use their firearms in self-defense between 500,000 and 3 million times annually,” reported Swearer.
When Everytown decided to administer “gun-safety courses” fronting as gun-control activism, anyone could have predicted they’d step in it. But it would have been difficult to predict they’d inadvertently argue how critical this right is to our freedom.
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