Self defense gun firearm training
GSL Defense Training. John Boch photo

There are plenty of excellent ways to exercise Second Amendment rights, such as hunting, enjoying or competing in the shooting sports or developing a firearm collection. However, the most important aspect of the Second Amendment is that it preserves the individual right to keep and bear arms to defend oneself, family and community.

A new study published in the journal Injury Prevention on July 25 shows that protection is the overwhelming reason Americans exercise their Second Amendment rights. Titled, “Firearm ownership for protection in the USA, 2023: results from a nationally representative survey,” the authors from the University of Michigan found, “Of all firearm owners, 78.8%… owned a firearm for protection.”

Moreover, the results suggest that more than half of gun owners at least sometimes exercise their Right-to-Carry. The researchers determined, “58.1%… carried a firearm outside their home in the last 12 months.”

As the researchers pointed out, the percentage of gun owners who cite protection as their reason for owning a firearm has increased in recent years. Further, the results comport with other research on this topic. A Pew Research Center survey from June 2023 found that 72-percent of gun owners cited protection as a “major reason” they own a gun and 91-percent cited it as a “major” or “minor” reason.

Another interesting excerpt from the Injury Prevention article found,

Gender and race/ethnicity emerged as robust sociodemographic correlates for ownership for protection. Women, black and Hispanic people were more likely to own firearms for protection than for other reasons. Decision tree analyses identified that black and Asian women (98.8%) almost exclusively owned for protection and, while men had a lower overall prevalence, owning for protection was more common among black (88.4%) than white men (69.7%; figure 2). Other characteristics, including political affiliation, were not significantly associated with motivation for firearm ownership;

This suggests that when anti-gun politicians target the types of firearms most useful for protection they are disproportionately harming women and minority gun owners.

As one might expect, some of the regime press wasn’t too keen on the results out of Ann Arbor. In a supposed news item on the study, that read more like an opinion piece, a CNN writer felt the need to refute the effectiveness of firearms for self-defense. The piece stated, “data from the National Crime Victimization Survey shows that guns are rarely used in self-defense during personal contact crimes.”

This ignores the profound evidence showing that firearms are used for protection at least hundreds of thousands of times per year.

In 1993, Florida State University Criminology Professor Gary Kleck conducted the National Self-Defense Survey to study the prevalence of defensive gun uses (DGUs), the results of which were published in a 1995 Journal of Law and Criminology article titled, “Armed Resistance to Crime: The Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun.” The article stated that survey data indicated that “each year in the U.S. there are about 2.2 to 2.5 million DGUs of all types by civilians against humans.”

After Kleck’s findings were published, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention conducted its own surveys of DGUs in its Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System survey from 1996 to 1998. However, the agency didn’t make its research public at the time – perhaps because the results did not conform to the CDC’s institutional anti-gun bias.

The CDC survey data finally came to light in 2018. Analyzing the CDC survey along with his own survey, Kleck found that the CDC data indicated that there are likely more than 1 million DGUs per year.

A subsequent survey, conducted in 2021 by Georgetown University Political Economist William English, placed the number of DGUs somewhere in between what the CDC and Kleck’s survey data indicated. In a research paper summarizing his findings, English noted,

The survey further finds that approximately a third of gun owners (31.1%) have used a firearm to defend themselves or their property, often on more than one occasion, and it estimates that guns are used defensively by firearms owners in approximately 1.67 million incidents per year.

Regardless of the media naysayers, gun rights supporters should take heart in that the data clearly show that an enormous portion, at the very least in the tens of millions, of Americans own firearms to exercise their Second Amendment right to armed self-defense.

—Courtesy NRA-ILA

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29 COMMENTS

      • Steadily growing pressure from gun owners not accepting further infringement without all kinds of resistance from the AWB sunset to now certainly didn’t hurt either. Certainly goes back farther but it is when I most noticed a change in direction.

      • Stated differently, if there were no need for defensive weapons, they wouldn’t be selling. We need weapons because people like miner49er exist.

      • you can quote studies till the cows come home…the bottom line is people are buying guns to protect themselves

    • RE: “the authors from the University of Michigan found, “Of all firearm owners, 78.8%… owned a firearm for protection.”

      78.8 % does not mean much when there are wishy washy politically inept Gun owners lending aide and comfort to democRats just a few short months before an election for POTUS. An example is Kyle Rittenhouse turning on POTUS DJT because DJT was not a Second Amendment Purist due partially to a Bumpstock Ban by EO following Vegas. To make it a short story the greenhorn Kyle saw the light and wised up due to pushback from voters who understand the importance of a crucial election to stop demoCrap.

      I have long tried to educate BumpStock crybabies on this forum and elsewhere about how the game was played by POTUS DJT following Vegas. Unfortunately the crybabies turned their backs on POTUS DJT and found comfort holding hands with democRats to slander POTUS DJT.

      Below Mark explains clearly why the moves POTUS DJT made following Vegas saved much more than were lost…All you crybabies can get off your behinds and pass it along to your like minded pals…
      https://youtube.com/watch?v=7QM9jCCW1V4&feature=shared

    • Not 1 million firearms, 1 million NICS. It is an untold number of firearms. In CA we can only do one gun a month due to Newsom. But most states can do multiple guns. It could be millions of guns. Let’s hope so.

  3. I’d be suspect of anything that a University of Anywhere “study” gives as a statistic… if they say 78.8% of respondents own a gun for self defense, you can probably double that figure to arrive at the true number. So, actually 157.6% of us do. FIFY

    • Unicorn whisperer,

      I am as skeptical / critical as anyone when it comes to university studies.

      Note the specific wording in this story that 78.8% of gun owners have firearms for self-defense. This study was NOT claiming that 78.8% of all people have firearms.

      • 78.8% increasing to 157.6% is known in Government Speak as a five-fold increase, as in
        “The five-fold increase in tax receipts has allowed us to start up even more programs to help the disadvantaged of America.”…. which is also
        GovernmentSpeak for paying for votes with someone else’s money.

  4. I have shared a similar estimate before and it is probably time to share it again.

    Various government sources tell us that they record something like 1,500 justified homicides each year–homicides where the defender used a firearm. Let’s lower that to just 1,000 per year to be conservative. Note that those are recorded instances of law enforcement recovering a dead body and determining that the trigger man/woman was legally justified. That number obviously does not include wounded attackers who survive and attackers who did not suffer any gunshot wound at all. Now, let’s estimate how many times in total a righteous defender used a firearm in self-defense based on the number of dead attackers.

    Let’s start with data:
    1) Just under 20% of all people with gunshot wounds die.
    2) Defenders only impart gunshot wounds to their attacker in about 2% of attacks.
    3) Defenders either brandish without firing or fire and miss in the other 98% of attacks.

    And now the estimate of how many times righteous defenders use firearms in self-defense:

    1) 1000 annual justifiable homicides and a 20% fatality rate means defenders shot their attackers 5,000 times (of which 1,000 died and 4,000 had gunshot wounds and survived).

    2) 5,000 attackers with gunshot wounds (only 1,000 fatal) means defenders used their firearm to defend against 250,000 attacks (of which defenders wounded/killed 5,000 attackers or 2% of attackers).

    That simple analysis and estimate BASED ON IRREFUTABLE DEAD BODIES tells us that righteous defenders used firearms to defend themselves from attackers about 250,000 times annually in the United States. Best of all, this method supports civilian disarmament claims that righteous defenders who use firearms to defend themselves rarely kill their attackers–which is true. Of course those very same civilian disarmament advocates fail to recognize and divulge the 249,000 additional times that defenders used firearms to defend themselves.

    And note that this estimate methodology fails to account for dead bodies where the killer is legally justified and police are never able to determine that. I have no doubt that many of the dead bodies discovered in our nation’s urban Hellscapes are actually attackers who succumbed to gunshot wounds from righteous defenders. (Said defenders remaining anonymous for various reasons.)

    • Yet another important note:

      My previous estimate also failed to account for dead attackers which law enforcement never discover. Such dead attackers could attack in locations where nature “consumes” them (such as swamps, forests, and large bodies of water). There are also likely a small number of dead attackers who righteous defenders intentionally bury or place in trash dumpsters.

      Any additional dead attackers increases the number of times that people righteously defend themselves with firearms by a factor of 250. Thus, if there are an additional 1,000 dead attackers that law enforcement never find/recognize every year, that means there are an additional 250,000 righteous self-defense events where the defender used a firearm.

    • Data don’t mattuh.

      The entire conflict is one of emotion, including those who are anti-2A because they want acceptance in psychopath club.

      Data cannot be thought of as a viable mind-changer. With all the brains on the pro-2A side, no one has come up with a winning emotional counterpoint.

      Winning hearts and minds means reaching the emotional center of the opponents life-view. Logic is insufficient to penetrate the emotional shell at least half the nation lives in.

      • Sam I Am,

        Unfortunately, your comment is absolutely correct and true.

        I have yet to figure out a winning emotional claim.

  5. I’ll take it but Screw protection, what about bearing arms to keep an out of control government in line. I’d like to see some high 70s% owning weapons for this reason. Thats when we’ll know we’re all on the right page.

    • “I’d like to see some high 70s% owning weapons for this reason.”

      Oh, that’s harsh. And mean. And impolite. And a micro aggression. Any who claims that citizens and residents are supposed to have a right, and the means, to overthrow government is spreading miss-information.

  6. “Of all firearm owners, 78.8%… owned a firearm for protection.”

    That seems a conservative number, actually. A lot of people, probably almost all people, who have guns for other reasons, will reach for those guns if/when threatened with physical harm. There really are some people who won’t fight back physically, and those people generally become statistics when SHTF. I mean, the average housewife would never dream of using a boning knife as a weapon, but when cornered in her home by an assailant, she will probably reach for whatever is at hand. It’s best, of course, if she has a man stopping firearm at hand. Even the ultra timid woman who might not effectively defend herself can become a raging Mama bear when her children are threatened. Give her the means to rage effectively.

    • Paul,

      I think the 78.8% number is plausible. I can easily picture a non-trivial number of firearm owners who acquired a rifle for deer hunting or a shotgun (with 28-inch barrel) for bird hunting and had zero regard for protection. Needless to say, a deer rifle with a scope and long barrel–as well as a shotgun with a 28-inch barrel–are very poor choices for “protection” at home.

      Similarly, a small number of firearm owners may have acquired one or two “tricked-out” firearms for target competitions which are also very poor choices (from a practical deployment standpoint) for protection in the home.

  7. last year was an ‘odd’ year for female self defense with DGU.

    its ‘odd’ because its the first year that out of the number of women attacked for purposes of rape more than 35% were armed with a firearm and successfully defended against the attack avoiding any injury and the rape and successfully repelled their attacker(s). This crime then just became ‘attempted assault’ or just ‘assault’. The rest of the female victims were not armed with a firearm and suffered some form of injury or were raped, some were killed, even if they used other ‘defensive means’ like, for example, pepper spray, and a small number managed to escape their attackers before the act of rape could take place even though they suffered some form of injury before doing so.

    • A somewhat recent survey of males (roughly ages 16 to 24) claims that about one-third of them said that they would rape a woman if they thought that they could get away with it.

      Note that “get away with it” refers to successfully defending against a conviction as well as somehow ensuring that the victim never reports it in the first place. Once you realize that, you hopefully realize that all responsible women should arm themselves when they are anywhere that they are vulnerable.

  8. AT 13 IN 1962 FIRST ITHACA SINGLE SHOT 22LR FOR PINKING , NOW 74 IN 2024 S&W GOVERNOR FOR HOME PROTECTION , 38 SPECIAL FOR CONCEAL CARRY .

    THANKS 2SD AMENDMENT , PROTECT OUR BELOVED USA CONSTITUTION ,
    ALL OF IT , FROM ALL FOREIGN AND DOMESTIC THREATS , MY ARMY OATH 1969 .

  9. What I find amusing is the simple fact the best firearm sales people are the anti firearm leftists demanding disarmament and support for their pro criminal and tyrant policies. Seems the harder the progressives push for their authoritarian socialist dystopia the more firearms people purchase.

    • “Seems the harder the progressives push for their authoritarian socialist dystopia the more firearms people purchase.”

      If only there was a way to sort out how many guns are sold, and how many are first-time buyers. Not a stat for changing minds, but encouragement that gun ownership is spreading.

  10. Best home defense weapon is a pump action shotgun, and it doesn’t even need to be loaded! All that one has to do is rack the action, that is a sound that all bad guys recognize, and they immediately vacate the area in great haste!

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