Take a moment and Google the number of gun deaths that occur in the USA every year.

In 2023, the gun murder number went above 18,000. Still, suicides account for more than half. The rest are divided between unintentional shootings, police shootings, and mass shootings (which, despite the media narrative, even with the books being throughly cooked, is less than 2%).

Note that the number of gun deaths by justified defensive use of force didn't pop up.

Even if you go with the Gun Violence Archive, which is openly anti-gun and wants to downplay defensive uses of firearms, we have about 75,000 cases of defensive uses of firearms a year. The more accurate number is probably around half a million.

So, you don't need to be great at math to figure out what's going on here. Even with the stingy numbers, most defensive uses of firearms don't result in a death.

This seems to be important. The anti-2A side has done nothing, and can do nothing to keep guns out of the hands of criminals. All they can do is throw people like me in prison if we misread a law or a new ATF policy goes unnoticed.

Still, the data are there and clear. Those of us who carry for self-defense don't want to pull the trigger. The right to bear arms probably doesn't just save innocent lives, but guilty lives too.