One of the most cited statistics to bolster the claim that the "Good guy with a gun" isn't a common thing comes from the FBI statistics on gun deaths.
Yes, there are very few gun deaths attributed to self-defense or defense of others.
There's a clear, logical reason for this.
A three people and one dickless incel were killed during the Greenwood Park mall shooting. That's because Eli Dicken only intended to kill one person, and that was the bad guy. Dicken didn't intend to kill anybody that day -- he was just thrust into a circumstance that compelled him to. If Dicken weren't there with his gun, the monster would have been able to keep the rampage going and kill a lot more people.
Still, the numbers from that case would show three people murdered to one person killed in lawful self-defense.
And that is a case in which a good guy with a gun did kill somebody. That's far from common.
Give or take, we have about forty thousand gun deaths a year in this country. Most of them are suicides. Prior to the crime spike, we had about thirteen thousand gun homicides a year. During the recent crime spike, that went up to about sixteen thousand a year. That's split between murders and lawful self-defense cases.
Most people who carry guns for self-defense, including me, don't want to kill anyone. I also carry non-lethal weapons. My gun is the last resort.
For criminals, the gun isn't the last resort.
This isn't the John Lott number, these are the CDC numbers, that there's somewhere between half a million and two and a half million uses of firearms in self-defense per year in this country.
So, is pretty simple, the overwhelming majority of cases in which a gun is used in self-defense results in nobody dead.
That seems like it should be good news, even for the pro-criminal side.
Of course, none of these statistics account for injuries inflicted with a firearm. Despite the narrative, guns aren't great at killing people. You're far more likely to survive a gun shot than a stabbing.
It should be obvious why the numbers in regard to gun deaths are so skewed. If you're using a gun lawfully in self-defense, YOU STOP WHEN THE THREAT STOPS! If you show your gun, and your attacker throws up his hands, says, "I'm sorry." and backs off, you don't proceed to shoot the guy -- that would be murder or assault and battery with a deadly weapon depending on the outcome.
Good guys with guns know when to stop. Bad guys with guns have no intention of stopping until they are stopped.
What a freaking surprise that it's such a small number of people who are killed by guns in self-defense incidents.
What really grindes my gears about this is that, all of these people have better access to this information than I have. Kathy Hochul doesn't have to do the work herself. Tim Walz doesn't have to do the work himself. Kamala Harris doesn't have to do the work herself. They all have people who can do the research and the thinking for them.
At some point, somebody must have said, "Ummm, hey, this is why the numbers look like this." That person probably got fired.