Of course every person of even mild intellect has observed that the anti-gun activists are mostly trying to bury the stories of people using guns in defense of themselves or others. They're trying to pretend that Eli Dicken and Craig Cope don't exist because they are toxic to the anti-gun narrative.
Others have at least acknowledged the Dicken story only to lie about the details. I doubt any of the anti-gun people would dare to talk about Cope being that that story completely destroys the narrative. Cope is an eighty-year-old man who was able to defend himself from an assault by four men who are much younger, bigger, and stronger. What's more, all four men were armed with weapons that are illegal in the state of California. Really, even though Cope was able to fire only one shot and get the men to retreat due to the wound inflicted on one of the bad guys, one has to acknowledge that it's by the grace of God that the other three men opted to run away rather than stay and fight. This is an argument for citizens to have a right to carry more ammunition. You see, the bad guys didn't care that they were breaking the law by possessing modified AR-15s with extended magazines because the sentence for armed robbery, which they intended to commit with the illegal weapons, is much greater than the sentence for simply having the gun. The only person in the story who was less than ideally armed was the law abiding citizen who defended himself.
Still, among the rare anti-gunners who are willing to talk about this, there's still a lie that stories like this are rare.
Even if it were true that guns being used in self-defense were man bites dog stories, as Matt Christiansen eloquently put it, telling the lottery winner how rare it is to win the lottery probably isn't going to change the fact that he's glad that he bought the ticket. Even if defensive use of a gun were particularly rare, it doesn't mean that a person staring down the barrel of a bad guys gun would be better off trying to call the cops or that hiding in a corner and sucking your thumb and praying that things will be okay is a viable alternative to being equipped to defend yourself.
All of that is refutation of the anti-gun with the assumption that self-defense usage of firearms were rare. Only, it isn't.
According to the Gun Violence Archive, there have been at least three defensive uses of guns per day this year. Last year, it was at least four a day. Defensive gun use is at least three to four times as common as mass shootings.
I keep saying "at least" because the Gun Violence Archive admits that they only use the numbers confirmed and reported to law enforcement. Namely, there are likely a lot of cases where a bad guy with a knife threatened a person who showed him a gun and the bad guy backed off.
In reality, we don't know how many times guns are used in self-defense situations in this country. We know that the lowest number dances around 1,500 a year in this country. The highest numbers dance around two million a year. Yeah, that's a big fucking gap and the number is definitely somewhere in the middle. Still, the myth that it's rare that people use guns for self-defense needs to be put to rest.
What's more, we're talking about these numbers in a country where most of the biggest cities with the highest crime rates also have the strictest gun laws. Seriously, look up the gun laws in New York (even after the SCOTUS decision) and tell me precisely how you would feel confident that you're legally compliant carrying a gun in the city if you're an average person living on an average salary. My new gun is California compliant and I've spent a lot of time and effort learning California's gun laws and I'm still certain that I'm likely to accidentally commit a felony if I take my gun into the state. Chicago is no better. Imagine how many more cases of defensive use of guns we'd have if the bastions of violent crime suddenly made it legal for average people to have access to guns.
This is one of the more perverse lies that we're constantly being told. It falls apart even more when you apply the basic logic of Bastiat which explores that which is unseen. Two seconds of honest thought to acknowledge that, if New Jersey didn't have bullshit gun laws, Carol Brown would have at least had a shot at being a defensive gun use statistic instead of a murder victim. If New York made it legal to carry a gun on public transit, maybe any one of the millions of New Yorkers who take the metro or the bus to and from work who have been assaulted or mugged would fall into the category of defensive gun use rather than another murder or rape victim.
I know that logic, reason, and honesty are foreign concepts for anti-gunners; but, we've gotta make an effort to hold the liars' feet to the fire. Lives depend on it.