by John Velleco
A left-wing group led by Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Campaign Chairman claims a “good guy with a gun” is a bad thing. Tell that to the good guy with a gun in Fort Worth who saved his own life, and maybe his children’s lives as well, from shooter JaDerek Gray, who opened fire on him in a road rage incident on I-35 West.
Gray was driving his motorcycle between lanes, which is illegal in Texas. The hero, driving an SUV next to Gray, couldn’t see him and tried to change lanes. Gray, furious, passed the SUV and parked his motorcycle in the middle of the highway, stopping traffic, witnesses said. Gray then pulled a gun and pointed it at the hero, who was in his vehicle with his children.
According to Fort Worth police, “the driver of the SUV asked him to please put the gun down,” but investigators believe Gray fired his weapon, missing. The hero pulled out his own gun and shot Gray, killing him before Gray could shoot him or his children.
That’s not good enough for the Center for American Progress (CAP), a radical think tank in Washington, D.C., founded by the infamous John Podesta, who helped engineer Russia-gate after helping Russian interests get a “Russian reset.” CAP just released an astonishing paper asserting—this is a quote—that “guns used for self-defense are not common, beneficial for society, or efficient in deterring mass shootings or criminal victimization.”
Really? A gun seemed pretty efficient in Fort Worth, and up to 2.8 million times per year regardless.
Yet gun-grabbers desperate to disprove the “good guy with a gun” argument are doing all they can to hunt it down and kill it. For instance, building on the CAP paper, the self-satisfied solons at Salon claim that a seminal 1995 paper overestimated the number of times, per year, that guns were used in self-defense. Specifically, that paper, published by the Northwestern University School of Law’s Journal of Criminal Law & Criminology, found that American civilians use guns in self-defense against offenders up to 2.5 million times each year. Not so fast, says Salon—Harvard begs to differ.
With all due respect to disgraced former Harvard President Claudine Gay’s august academic institution, there’s actually additional evidence that the 2.5 million self-defense high-end estimate may not be all that far off. For instance, a national survey by Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business Professor William English found that about 31.1 percent of those who own firearms report having used a gun to defend themselves or their property, often on more than one occasion. Extrapolating the figures, English found, suggests at least “1.67 million defensive uses of firearms per year.” In fact, English calls this estimate “inherently conservative,” because including those who do not personally own firearms could push the estimate “perhaps as high as 2.8 million per year.”
What’s more, too often, Hillary’s handmaidens only count a “good guy with a gun” if he saved a person from criminals. Such figures specifically leave out armed robberies from commercial entities such as convenience stores or gas stations, and other times when good guys win because they had a gun to stop a criminal. Besides, even someone successfully able to thwart an attack might never report it to the authorities, given that states with draconian firearm regulations like New York arrest good guys for using a gun to defend themselves or others.
What about mass public murders in particular? According to Podesta’s propaganda, not only are guns “not typically used for self-defense,” they are also not “effective in deterring mass shootings.”
Sure, if you ask the FBI, which researchers have repeatedly nailed for excluding cases where armed citizens intervened in attacks. In fact, the FBI simply left out at least six such cases in 2018-19, and the corrected figure more than doubled to over 15 percent of mass shootings—the percentage in which good guys with guns stopped shooters dead.
Even the Washington Post’s fact-checker reported that the “FBI brushed aside repeated efforts to get a response to these problems, ultimately saying, ‘We have no additional information to provide other than what is provided within the active shooter reports on our website.'” Since then, adding back in more incidents the FBI somehow overlooked, the percentage of mass killings stopped by a good guy with a gun rose to 35.7 percent, and in 2022, it rose further to 41.3 percent.
Besides, in places where Hillary Clinton’s allies are in charge, only criminals and cops have guns. By contrast, in places where law-abiding citizens can carry firearms, good guys with guns have stopped more than 51 percent of active shooting incidents—and in 2022 in particular, they stopped “a remarkable 63.5 percent” of mass murders.
All these numbers, however, only tell part of the story. All the “lies, damn lies, and statistics” Hillary’s allies produce can’t change the fact that you have a God-given right to protect yourself and your family, a right enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.
If you want more proof that we need good guys with guns, go ask the Fort Worth highway driver who—along with his children—is alive today.
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John Velleco is the executive vice president for Gun Owners of America, a grassroots lobbying organization with more than 2 million members and supporters nationwide.
Photo “Good Guy with a Gun” by USCCA.
