A Milestone: The 4000th Entry on the Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog

A Milestone: The 4000th Entry on the Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog

The Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog just crossed a rather significant milestone: the 4000th entry. Since I started this project in 2003, Dave Burnett and myself (and Pete Drum, before he went on to other activities) have been posting every news story that we could find in which civilians in the U.S. used a gun in self-defense. By "civilian" we mean persons who are not active or retired police officers (who have a special status in the law when it comes to carrying and using weapons).

These entries are (with one or two exceptions, such as when my neighbor chased an intruder out of his daughter's room) all derived from published news sources. Of necessity, this means that these were incidents sufficiently high profile to receive the attention of both police and news media.

The 4000th incident isn't necessarily typical, but it isn't all that atypical, either. No shots were fired. The mere display of a gun by a concealed weapon permit holder stopped a nasty road rage confrontation from escalating to violence. And contrary to the claims that many opponents of shall issue made in state after state of what would happen if shall issue laws were passed, the person with the gun wasn't the aggressor; he was the victim of a person who clearly lacked sufficient self-control to cool off.

Regular readers know that the reason that I started the Civilian Gun Self-Defense Blog was an email exchange between myself and anti-gun Professor John J. Donohue back in 2003, in which he claimed that legitimate defensive uses of guns by civilians were extremely rare. Thanks, Professor Donohue, for making me do this!

Along the way, we started adding labels by state and interesting characteristics of the incidents. Some interesting statistics from these 4000 incidents:

By state: Alaska (31); Alabama (143); Arkansas (63); Arizona (98); California (265); Colorado (48); Connecticut (18); D.C. (2); Delaware (16); Florida (368); Georgia (161); Hawaii (3); Iowa (14); Idaho (19); Illinois (61); Indiana (117); Kansas (37); Kentucky (69); Louisiana (102); Massachusetts (22); Maryland (30); Maine (15); Michigan (118); Minnesota (29); Missouri (89); Mississippi (79); Montana (19); North Carolina (184); North Dakota (6); Nebraska (14); New Hampshire (22); New Jersey (13); New Mexico (29); Nevada (45); New York (87); Ohio (184); Oklahoma (102); Oregon (44); Pennsylvania (146); South Carolina (109); South Dakota (8); Tennessee (181); Texas (506); Utah (39); Virginia (83); Virgin Islands (1); Vermont (7); Washington (76); Wisconsin (33); West Virginia (22); Wyoming (9). (To find all incidents involving a particular state, use this URL with the post office two letter abbreviation substituted for AK.)

There were 212 incidents involving concealed carry permit holders.

Not every outcome was happy. There were 30 incidents in which the defender was killed (although often saving the life of another, or preventing the attacker from escaping). There were 191 incidents in which the defender was shot (although not necessarily killed).

For all the talk by gun control advocates that "a criminal will just take away your gun and use against you" there were only six incidents in which the defender's gun was taken away and used against the defender. By comparison, there were 183 incidents in which the criminal's gun was taken away and used against the criminal! More startling is that many of these involved victims that were unarmed at the start of the crime.

There were 67 female defenders, and 15 defenders under the age of 18.

Sobering numbers: there were 90 criminals identified as being under 18, and 1009 of these incidents were home invasions--where the criminals intentionally broke into a dwelling that they knew was occupied.

For all the talk of inadequately trained civilians, we have one incident involving mistaken identity.

As I have previously mentioned, while there were some pretty scummy characters engaged in self-defense that have popped up over these last 5 1/2 years, and a few incidents that were technically legal but poorly advised, I have been impressed how many of these have been perfectly reasonable people doing perfectly reasonable things--until they were attacked by a criminal.