We write a fair bit about armed citizen stories. We’re far from alone as well, with most of the pro-gun media covering various stories about regular folks using firearms to defend themselves from violent criminals.

But there’s debate about such incidents.

There’s no doubt they happen. We couldn’t write about them if they didn’t.

Yet we’re also told quite often that armed citizens don’t actually make us any safer. How is that the case when we know we’re only touching the tip of the iceberg in our own coverage?

Well, America’s 1st Freedom decided to weigh in on the subject.

A recent incident in Las Vegas proved once again that armed citizens save lives—and sometimes many, many lives.

On June 23, a man wearing a helmet and armed with a rifle and other firearms charged into the Turnberry Towers luxury condominiums in Las Vegas and began firing shots in the lobby area. Humberto Garcia, an armed front-desk employee carrying a concealed firearm, quickly shot the attacker, putting an end to what could have been a mass-murder situation.

Lt. Noe Esparza with the Las Vegas Metro Police Department tried to calm the public by saying, “I want to dispel any reports of any active assailant or any activeshooter situations; that was not the case here today.”

But, had the attacker not been stopped, it could have quickly turned into an “active-shooter situation.” Some residents who were near the site of the attack called the desk employee a “hero” and believe he saved their lives. The incident was briefly in the news, but once the armed citizen aspect was discovered, gun-control advocates and much of the so-called mainstream media simply chose to ignore the story.

This “lie of omission” is nearly as telling as the outright untruths they regularly claim about armed Americans. Here’s where they’re wrong.

1. Armed Citizens Do Stop Crimes
Many gun-control supporters try to ignore or play down the fact that armed citizens use their firearms frequently to protect themselves and others. The most-recent data available on defensive gun usage is quite telling. The 2021 National Firearms Survey, conducted under the supervision of Georgetown University professor William English, estimated 1.67 million defensive gun uses annually in the United States. That comes out to about 4,575 a day!

Now, they go down some different rabbit holes than I’m interested in going down, though I recommend you go and read the whole thing. Just because I’m not talking about it doesn’t mean it’s not interesting stuff.

With all of that out of the way, let’s look at these numbers for a second.

If I opted to be charitable to the mainstream media, and I’m not, I’d look at this and acknowledge that there’s no way they could cover all of these armed citizen stories. At 4,575 defensive gun uses per day, there’s no way any publication could cover all of these stories.

Further, not all of them were likely to make the news in the first place. After all, if the police aren’t called and the press is unaware of the incident, they can’t cover it. When someone presents their firearm and the bad guy runs, most folks aren’t going to call the cops because they don’t want the hassle.

And then you have the instances where they do and the police simply don’t file a report for whatever reason.

So that’s the best-case scenario–they just can’t cover so many cases, so they don’t, and not every case even gets reported to the authorities anyway–but there’s a lot more.

After all, there are some that are high-profile, like what happened in Las Vegas.

It’s pretty clear the bad guy showed up to commit a mass shooting and was stopped by an armed citizen. Yet that story evaporated into nothing, in part because nobody but the bad guy got shot.

There, it’s pretty obvious that the mainstream media won’t cover it because they don’t like the message it sends. If people realize that guns actually do save lives, we might end up with more armed citizens and less gun control.

While the media likes to pretend otherwise, they’re heavily biased against the Second Amendment, and that colors their coverage of stories.

Armed citizens make us safer. They just won’t cover it.