As wildfires raged last month in California, tens of thousands of people were forced to flee their homes, often with just minutes of warning. To make matters worse, looters took advantage of the chaos and lack of police resources, showing up in droves to ransack evacuated areas—sometimes as helpless residents looked on in horror as their doorbell cameras captured the looting in real time.
Fortunately for residents of at least some evacuated areas, a handful of their armed neighbors stayed behind to protect their homes and livelihoods from would-be looters—in some cases, bravely patrolling their streets with firearms in what certainly seemed to be open defiance of the state’s public carry laws.
But for countless others, the state’s restrictive gun laws undoubtedly complicated their ability to defend their homes, at the very least compounding their anxiety by raising questions about their legal rights in a state notorious for treating lawful gun owners as the enemy of public safety. Barriers like mandatory waiting periods, meanwhile, ensured that Californians who didn’t already own guns would be kept from exercising one of their most fundamental rights precisely when it mattered most.
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Indeed, the right to keep and bear arms is centered on the underlying natural right of self-defense. And Americans are very effective at exercising that vital right—at least when the government gets out of the way.
Almost every major study has found that Americans use their firearms in self-defense between 500,000 and 3 million times annually, according to the most recent report on the subject by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2021, the most comprehensive study ever conducted on the issue concluded that roughly 1.6 million defensive gun uses occur in the United States every year.
For this reason, The Daily Signal publishes a monthly article highlighting some of the previous month’s many news stories on defensive gun use that you may have missed—or that might not have made it to the national spotlight in the first place. (Read accounts from past months and years here.)
The examples below represent only a small portion of the news stories on defensive gun use that we found in January. You may explore more by using The Heritage Foundation’s interactive Defensive Gun Use Database.
* Jan. 4, North Charleston, South Carolina: When a man saw his neighbor dragging a woman by her hair through the front yard of a nearby home, he called 911, then grabbed his handgun before successfully intervening to protect the woman without having to fire a shot. Police arrived and arrested the neighbor, who was “visibly intoxicated” and smelled of alcohol. He was charged with first-degree domestic violence.
* Jan. 6, Grovetown, Georgia: Police say that a woman—who was nine months pregnant—shot and wounded her ex-boyfriend after he smashed a living room window in an attempt to force his way inside the home. The ex-boyfriend (who was also the father of the woman’s 2-year-old son and unborn child) had previous domestic violence convictions. Police quickly arrested him on unrelated warrants for violating his probation, and he now faces an additional charge for domestic violence-related criminal trespass.
* Jan. 9, Clarion, Pennsylvania: After a woman and her husband discovered a serial stalker had come to their home and parked in their driveway, one of the woman’s employees responded to their call for help and detained the stalker at gunpoint until police arrived. Police arrested the stalker, who they described as engaging in “an escalating pattern of concerning behavior” over the last two years. He’d been released on bail just 17 days earlier after a different stalking incident involving the same victims. ...
As these stories demonstrate, the right to keep and bear arms is often most critically important at the times when we least expect to need it. Few people wake up in the morning anticipating that their day will involve a life-threatening encounter during which the government won’t be there to protect them.
But criminal violence rarely comes with advanced warnings. We never know when civil society’s protections will fail, either for us as individuals or for our broader communities. And for all of the moments in which the government can’t or won’t be there to protect us, the Second Amendment ensures that we can protect ourselves (unless, of course, the government regulates that assurance away in the name of “common sense” gun restrictions)