A taxi driver in upstate New York used his legally concealed weapon to keep an ice-pick armed woman at bay.

A Rochester taxi driver says he was forced to pull a gun to protect him from a passenger who tried to attack him with an ice pick.

“I believe she would have killed me had if i had been close enough to her,” said Collin Green, the man who drove the taxi.

According to Gates Police, 39-year-old Katrina Green has was charged with menacing and other violations Monday night.

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Four years ago, Collin was attacked while driving his cab and was stabbed 13 times. From that he learned two lessons: to register and carry a gun, and to respect its power.

As Collin was backing away from the ice pick, he pulled out the gun, then took a deep breath.

“I was like, ‘Look, don’t come any further. Don’t make me do this. I don’t want to have to hurt you,'” Collin said.

He said his goal was to stay calm and put some distance between them.

It worked. She paused and he jumped into his taxi and drove away.

Mr. Green was able to get the woman to back off without having to fire a shot, which is both the best possible outcome, and is the most common way firearms are used every day in the United States.

While it doesn’t often show up in the local news like this incident, the most common way firearms are used in self-defense is merely brandishing them to scare away criminals. Estimates of defensive gun uses per-year range from 2.1 million (Kleck & Gertz) to 4.7 million (Cook & Ludwig, PDF) times a year, and the vast majority of those involve merely the display of a firearm.

That data makes sense to me. Outside my military and law enforcement contacts (many whom have been in shootings in combat or in law enforcement context) I don’t know of anyone who has fired a gun at a criminal, but I know more than a dozen who have acquired a firing grip on a concealed weapon, brandished a weapon openly, or have even pointed a gun at a criminal to send them fleeing.

Gun control supporters love to sweep these figures under the rug because there are so many of them. They try to pretend a defensive gun use isn’t “real” unless there is a (typically inaccurate) news story, which is how Everytown fabricated their school shooting report.

In the real world, we know defensive gun uses are very common, and no amount of deception by the gun control lobby can change that.