The only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. We know how poorly that whole thing can be misunderstood. Yet it's not overly complicated, either. Unless a bad guy wants to stop shooting, the only thing that will stop him is a good guy with a firearm.

Yes, that includes police, but the police aren't always around. If you're faced with an armed attacker, the cops can get there just in time to draw a chalk outline around your body.

Don't get me wrong, they generally want to keep you safe. They just physically can't.

Which is where the right to keep and bear arms comes into play. It means that I can have the means to defend myself and others, especially when there are no police available to try and stop the attack.

Yet the anti-gun side routinely pretends the "good guy with a gun" thing is a myth, that it's not real.

And to do that, they try to debunk something they don't understand.

Surveys at the time, including a widely-cited study by Gary Kleck and Matt Gertz, estimated that between 760,000 and 2.5 million defensive gun uses (DGU) occurred annually.

But the Harvard Injury Control Research Center found two years later that fewer than 550,000 burglaries occurred in gun owners' homes annually, while Kleck and Gertz had estimated that "guns were used for self-defense during burglaries approximately 845,000 times."

"Burglary victims would have needed to use their gun defensively in more than 100% of cases, which is, of course, impossible," the issue brief reads.

Well, first of all, Kleck and Gertz reported numbers very similar to what was found in a study the CDC tried to hide. That somehow didn't make it into this "debunking" for some reason.

But what about the study that suggests Kleck & Gertz couldn't possibly have gotten it right?

Well, the Harvard Injury Control Research Center isn't exactly an unbiased source of information. Their gun research is funded by the Joyce Foundation, which has been described as "the anti-NRA."

In other words, a research center funded by an anti-gun foundation reached a conclusion that suggests there's now way research supporting gun ownership could be right. Hmmmmmmmm.

Until the myth of the "good guy with the gun" is defeated, said Devin Hughes, founder and president of GVPedia, "Americans will continue buying firearms in the mistaken belief that those guns will make them safer, and gun violence will continue unabated."

"Accurate information is critically important in fighting America’s epidemic of gun violence. Just as important, however, is countering inaccurate information," Hughes added.

CAP also analyzed data on DGU from the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), which estimated just 70,000 such instances per year.

The group found that nine times as many people report being victimized by a person with a gun than being protected by a firearm. Respondents to two Harvard surveys taken in 1996 and 1999 were three times as likely to report being threatened or victimized with a gun than having used one to protect themselves.

The NCVS is a useful survey in a lot of ways, but to pretend that it's perfect is wrong.

We know that there can be over-reporting and under-reporting issues with the survey. In fact, there are a lot of issues with the NCVS. The survey basically asks what is believed to be a representative sample of fewer than a quarter of a million people. This is good to track a lot of crimes, but not everything.

Then we have the fact that a lot of defensive gun uses simply aren't going to be reported for a variety of reasons, including people being concerned that the information will be tracked in some way and that the survey isn't exactly anonymous. Gun owners can be a bit concerned about telling law enforcement they have guns.

And let's not forget that at least some defensive gun uses didn't involve two-legged predators bout four-legged ones. Those who use a gun to deal with a wild animal still used a firearm defensively.

Then we have one inescapable fact that the authors of this so-called study failed to acknowledge: Even if defensive gun uses aren't as common as we'd like to think, the vast majority of defensive gun uses prevented someone from being seriously injured or killed.

Now, let's look at facts they would never put in this piece. For example, lawful gun ownership doesn't translate to criminal offenses with a firearm. Bad guys don't walk into gun stores and purchase firearms lawfully. They get then through illicit means which bypass every manner of gun control you care to concoct.

They're not buying them from private sellers, either, in most cases, even in states where such sales are perfectly legal.

So gun control doesn't actually translate to a reduction in crime.

In fact, we touched on this on Monday when an anti-gunner basically got take to school over his claims that more gun mean more crime, only for us to see that cities in states that just passed permitless carry saw massive drops in violent crime.

That alone invalidates this claim that the good guy with a gun is a myth.

But hey, when have facts ever bothered them?