The estimates on defensive gun uses vary depending on who is doing the estimating. Yet even the low-ball figures from anti-gun researchers tend to put the number in the six-digit range per year, meaning guns protect innocent life more often than they're used to take them. That's true even if you leave the suicide numbers in the "gun death" figures.
But the truth is that there are a lot more than 100,000 or so defensive gun uses.
That's not me talking, either. That's the latest survey talking, and anti-gunners are going to be pissed.
William English is back with another comprehensive survey on gun ownership and defensive gun use (DGUs).
After his 2021 National Firearms Survey, for having the temerity to do a huge survey on defensive gun use in the U.S. that was not forced into the narrative of today’s gun-control activism, English, of Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, was subpoenaed, attacked in The New York Times, ridiculed by many other “mainstream” outlets and, basically, pilloried in order to, as he put it in The Wall Street Journal, “warn off other academics thinking of doing similar research, and to influence courts where states are losing on the merits.”
Data from the 2021 survey estimated that armed citizens use their guns defensively about 1.67 million times annually; and, indeed, the survey found that “in most defensive incidents (81.9 percent) no shot was fired.”
This data drove anti-gun advocates crazy.
Now, the 2026 National Firearms Survey estimates that armed citizens in America use their guns 2.2 million to defend themselves or others.
English catches flak for his work, but that's not unusual. In fact, scientific self-censorship is common enough to have been identified and discussed, including by me. If he doesn't toe the line and publishes work with an unpopular result, he's going to catch hate from others in academia. No matter what methodology he uses, they attack him for somehow doing the job wrong, but when those same methods produce results they like, they attack nothing.
Now, let's talk about that number for a moment. A whopping 2.2 million defensive gun uses? That sounds familiar.
Maybe it's because it's in the same range as what criminologist Gary Kleck found years ago, and what a study the CDC tried to bury found.
In the social sciences, there's something of a replication crisis. They can't get experiments to repeat the findings of earlier efforts. This means what they found might not be completely invalidated, but it means no one knows what the hell is going on.
Yet the fascinating thing here is that these consistent numbers come from multiple researchers whose studies yield similar numbers. I'm not a scientist, but this looks like replication to me. In other words, these numbers are a lot more valid than anything the anti-gunners might try to peddle to the world.
That's the good news.
The bad news is that because they're inconvenient, English will get more hate and the mainstream media will largely ignore his findings and use some ridiculous number, like those from the Gun Violence Archive, that only records those that make the news.
But we know better.
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