The good news: violent crime is dropping:
The long-term trend in the rate of violent victimization shows a decline from 1993 to 2021, from 79.8 to 16.5 victimizations per 1,000 persons age 12 or older. Violent victimization includes rape or sexual assault, robbery, aggravated assault, and simple assault. More recently, the rate of violent victimization declined from 26.1 in 2012 to 16.5 victimizations per 1,000 in 2021, despite an increase between 2015 and 2018. Between 2020 and 2021, the violent victimization rate did not change.
It's actually been dropping fairly steadily since its "crack"-era peaks in the '90s, with a few spikes (2015, 2020) thrown in.
And according to a survey from Georgetown's McDOnough School of Business, at least part of that decrease is due to the roughly 80 million law-abiding citizens using those guns to deter crime (emphasis added by me):
.@JoJoFromJerz, again, see this link. https://t.co/XyqeWp50Sr
— John R Lott Jr. (@JohnRLottJr) March 24, 2024
“defensive gun uses — including instances when guns are simply shown to deter a crime — are four to five times more common than gun crimes, and far more frequent than the fewer than 20,000 murders each year, with or…
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. Handguns are the most common firearm employed for self-defense (used in 65.9% of defensive incidents), and in most defensive incidents (81.9%) no shot was fired. Approximately a quarter (25.2%) of defensive incidents occurred within the gun owner's home, and approximately half (53.9%) occurred outside their home, but on their property. About one out of ten (9.1%) defensive gun uses occurred in public, and about one out of twenty (4.8%) occurred at work.
And there are a lot of us out there, and we take self-defense very seriously:
18 accredited studies (3 by the CDC) average 1.9 million Defensive Gun Uses per year. 162,000 where mortal danger was assured had a firearm not been used for protection. The number of lives saved through Defensive Gun Use far exceeds the number of lives taken. pic.twitter.com/DLvvCFRXbF
— 2ATexan (@2ndATexan) May 19, 2026
A majority of gun owners (56.2%) indicate that they carry a handgun for self-defense in at least some circumstances, and about 35% of gun owners report carrying a handgun with some frequency. We estimate that approximately 20.7 million gun owners (26.3%) carry a handgun in public under a ``concealed carry'' regime; and 34.9% of gun owners report that there have been instances in which they had wanted to carry a handgun for self-defense, but local rules did not allow them to carry.
Crunch the numbers, and law-abiding Americans use guns to deter more crime than criminals commit with them:
The National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) estimates there were approximately 330,000 violent victimizations involving a firearm in 2021. That same year there were estimated 1.67 million defensive gun uses. That is defensive gun uses are 5.06 times more than firearms used in crime.
The estimates of civilian defensive gun use aren't new, either - they track with data criminologist Gary Kleck collected back in the '90s - so the claim isn't the outlier, the criticisms are. But even if they were off by, say, 80%, that'd still leave civilian uses to deter crime even with the number of gun crimes.
The most notable thing about the "research" opposing gun rights is how very sloppy it all is:
The gun violence archive people are extremely misleading
— John R Lott Jr. (@JohnRLottJr) January 5, 2024
- their cases are virtually always just news stories and that only involves a ting fraction of DGUs.
- on top of that the GVA misses many news stories. https://t.co/XyqeWp50Sr
I love a million and a half happier endings.
