Every time there’s a mass shooting, gun owners routinely comment that we only wish there’d been a good guy with a gun there to stop the attack. Anti-gunners routinely scoff at such a suggestion, arguing that good guys with a gun don’t stop mass shootings.

So, who is right?

Well, according to the FBI, we are.

Citizens, both armed and unarmed, successfully intervened in eight active shooter incidents over the last two years, according to a new report from the FBI. The agency said the “selfless actions” of those who thwarted the attacks “likely saved many lives.” In total, the FBI recorded 943 casualties — 221 deaths and 722 injuries — across 50 mass shootings, including 20 in 2016 and 30 in 2017. All the shooters were male, ranging in age from 14 to 66, according to the report. “The enhanced threat posed by active shooters and the swiftness with which active shooter incidents unfold support the importance of preparation by law enforcement officers and citizens alike,” the report concludes. In one instance of citizen-involvement, an armed volunteer firefighter restrained a 14-year-old who opened fire at an elementary school playground in Townville, South Carolina, killing two and injuring three others. In another case, a citizen held an attacker at gunpoint inside a church in Antioch, Tennessee after he killed a person in the parking lot and wounded six others.

The most high profile was Stephen Willeford who famously stopped the shooter at Sutherland Springs last year.

However, what we see time and again is a simple statement that anti-gunners refuse to acknowledge: guns save lives. They’ve saved an untold number of lives in just these eight incidents.

You never know when something like this is going to go down, which is why armed citizens are so important. The more places they are and the more of them there are, the greater the chance of an armed citizen being able to stop it.

The police, despite their best efforts and desires, simply can’t stop these things. They’re almost never in the right place at the right time. While I have little doubt that just about every police officer in the nation, with some exceptions, wouldn’t hesitate to rush into a such a situation, they don’t have the opportunity most of the time. By the time they get there, it’s too late for far too many people.

But an armed citizen can act. They can be there, ready to respond to the threat.

Meanwhile, anti-gun zealots spend all their time trying to disarm these people, the good people who put their lives on the line for their fellow man and fail to understand that the bad guys won’t stop. At most, they’ll shift weapons to something else. That’s only if they don’t know how to get their hands on firearms illegally, which many of them do.

It’s the armed citizen that stands against these atrocities. It’s also the armed citizen that is the one who will ultimately suffer for every policy proposed by anti-gun crusaders. Not that the anti-gunners care.

After all, in their minds, the good guy with a gun doesn’t exist, even though the FBI says otherwise.