Evan Vucci/Associated Press

The National Rifle Association maintains a blog called The Armed Citizen, which highlights defensive gun use. The latest entry, from April 9, describes three incidents: Two from 2013 and one archival example from 1969. It’s not hard to see what the NRA’s getting at, but just in case, a sidebar on the site states: “Studies indicate that firearms are used over 2 million times a year for personal protection, and that the presence of a firearm, without a shot being fired, prevents crime in many instances.” In other words, as Wayne LaPierre put it after Newtown, “the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.”

That’s almost as catchy as “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” The problem is: The 2 million figure — often inflated to 2.5 million in N.R.A. literature — is bogus. Defensive gun use is actually quite rare.



A new paper from the Violence Policy Center states that “for the five-year period 2007 through 2011, the total number of self-protective behaviors involving a firearm by victims of attempted or completed violent crimes or property crimes totaled only 338,700.” That comes to an annual average of 67,740 — not nothing, but nowhere near the N.R.A.’s 2 million or 2.5 million.

Readers can judge for themselves whether the V.P.C. or the N.R.A. is likely to have better numbers. The V.P.C. used data from the National Crime Victimization Survey, conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. The N.R.A.’s estimate is the result of a telephone survey conducted by a Florida State University criminologist.

The V.P.C. also found that in 2010 “there were only 230 justifiable homicides involving a private citizen using a firearm” reported to the F.B.I.’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program. Compare that with the number of criminal gun homicides in the same year: 8,275. (That’s not counting gun suicides or unintentional shootings.) Or compare it with the number of Americans killed by guns since Newtown: 3,458.

As the V.P.C. paper states, “guns are rarely used to kill criminals or stop crimes.”