On Wednesday, Erika posted a story about how many times a firearm was used to stop a crime in November. It’s an interesting post that shows a handful of the law-abiding people who use a firearm to defend themselves all the time.

However, it gives the count as 22 people. Is that right?

Yes and no. As Erika notes in her post, these are just the people who used a firearm in public. Those are the people who we know about.

What we don’t think about are all the uses that occur with almost no one being any the wiser. You see, there are countless cases of people being afraid for their lives and pulling a firearm, but it never shows up in any official statistics.

For example, take a man and a woman walking on a city street. It’s night and not particularly crowded, but fairly well lit and they believe they’re safe. Then a thug shows up with a knife, demanding their valuables. The man draws a 9mm handgun, causing said thug to recognize that he has committed the age-old sin of bringing a knife to a gunfight. At this point, the thug runs like Lena Dunham when someone yells “CAKE!”

Sure, the couple calls the police and a statement is taken. They might even catch the thief. But their defensive use of a firearm never shows up on official statistics.

Another example is the hunter who uses his deer rifle to scare off a mountain lion that threatens him in the woods. Or how about the father taking his kids for a walk when they’re menaced by wild dogs, prompting him to fire at them?

These are defensive uses of a firearm. These are all cases of an individual using a lawfully owned firearm to defend their lives or the life of another, yet it doesn’t make lists. In the case of those dealing with wild animals, it may never even be reported.

While the gun grabbers are very fond of claiming we should try gun control, citing, “if it saves just one life” as if it were some magical mantra, they forget that we need balance. What good is saving one life if it costs you two?

Yet every year, many times more lives are saved with guns than are taken with them. This is true with even the most conservative estimate of defensive gun uses, which claims only happens 108,000 times annually. And yes, that’s still almost three times more than the number of deaths attributed to firearms by anti-gunners, a number that’s artificially inflated by lumping suicides in with homicides and accidental deaths.

Most people who use a firearm defensively never show up in hard data. Yet there are far more of them every year that those who we lose to homicides. They’re never counted and easily dismissed by the anti-gun crusaders. That means we–and yes, I’m one of that number–owe it not just to ourselves but our fellow citizens to remind people that we exist, even if we never show up on such lists.