The word "vigilante" gets tossed around in regard to people who have used guns for self-defense, even recently the Washington Post strangely referred to Daniel Penny in that way despite him not having a weapon.
It wouldn't be so annoying if it were just people on social media, who usually don't know what words mean, making this regular mistake. When the media are doing it, you know that it's a lie.
There's a reason why most of us learned the word "vigilante" from Batman. Batman doesn't just mind his own business and live his life while being properly prepared for the worse. There are real-life vigilantes who have legitimate delusions of grandeur, and look for crime to happen.
I'm not saying that at shouldn't use the word when it actually applies. We shouldn't use the word when it doesn't apply. The clear reason for using the word when it doesn't apply is that anti-gun people think of pro-gun people as individuals that are secretly hoping for an excuse to be a hero, or just to have an excuse to shoot somebody.
This is nothing new. If you look up Bernie Goetz, he's still regularly referred to as a vigilante due to his part in shooting four men on the NYC subway with an illegally possessed firearm. Once again, if Goetz's story were that he had been assaulted and mugged a few times, and decided to buy a gun to go out looking for the criminals, the word would apply. That wasn't the story. Goetz had been mugged, assaulted, and hospitalized; so, he bought a gun for personal protection. Still, he was just trying to go about his day when he was threaten again. The one difference was that he was finally prepared.
Daniel Penny clearly would have been just about anywhere else than that specific subway car in New York; but, he was just on a visit to the city and got unlucky.
Eli Dicken is one of the greatest American heroes of recent years for stopping the Greenwood Park shooter. People called him a vigilante before the media just tried to bury the story. Again, the word doesn't apply. Dicken's plan was to have a nice trip to he mall with his girlfriend. That's a normal thing for a young man to do. He wasn't trying to be a hero when he made his plans. He just became a hero because he was well prepared when the unthinkable happened.
I mean, yeah, most of these people who end up in these situations try to be vigilant. People who are prepared tend to try to be aware. That's massively different from going out looking for trouble.
Of course there are people who are out looking for trouble. Most of us just want to be prepared if, God forbid, trouble finds us.