A Canton, MI man is off the hook after officials ruled his shooting of another man was self-defense. The 26-year-old man was at a woman’s home when the woman’s ex-boyfriend entered the premises and attacked him.

A 26-year-old Ypsilanti man acted in self-defense when he fired a shot that wounded another man’s leg and grazed his scrotum during a domestic dispute inside a Canton mobile home, authorities have confirmed. The shooter was at a Canton woman’s home when her ex-boyfriend walked in and began to attack him, prompting him to fire a shot from a handgun, according to police reports. The Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office has denied criminal charges against the shooter. “Based on the facts of the case, it was deemed he acted in self-defense,” Canton Deputy Police Chief Craig Wilsher said.

With a wound like that, I suspect the injured man will be rethinking some of his life choices as he reportedly drove himself to the hospital.

Previous reports by law enforcement indicate the injured man was previously abusive of his ex, which indicates a propensity for violence.

Had the shooter not been armed, it’s difficult to know just what would have happened, but the indication is there would have been someone getting hurt, if not killed. Perhaps more than one, at that.

Yet there are those out there who see these reports and will claim that they don’t matter. They’ll kvetch about guns, ignoring the hundreds of thousands of cases (at a minimum) of defensive uses of a firearm. They pretend the number of defensive uses of a firearm isn’t orders of magnitude larger than the uses of a gun for criminal enterprises.

If the gun control crowd had their way about it, it’s entirely possible that one to two people could be dead. As it is, one guy got shot in the leg and had a close encounter with the possibility of becoming transsexual against his will. This is a win for everyone involved…even the alleged bad guy here.

That’s what happens in most defensive uses of a firearm. It’s not a matter of someone getting killed most of the time. No, it’s the bad guy sees an armed good guy and takes off at a run, maybe rethinking his decision-making paradigm as he contemplates his own mortality, all without a trigger being pressed. Maybe a shot gets fired and misses, but it’s enough to send the criminal scampering back to do some deep thinking himself. Sometimes, it’s a relatively minor wound.

The vast majority of the time, lives are saved by a gun. The mere presence of a firearm ends the fight more often than not, but when it’s necessary to use it, there are a lot of varying grades of use.

In this case, a bad guy was stopped with no loss of life. In that way, it’s like the vast majority of cases of guns being used defensively. It’s not about killing bad guys for most gun owners, it’s about keeping them and their’s safe and secure. Why is that so hard for anti-gun zealots to get?