At the end of July, tragedy struck New York City when a deeply troubled Nevada man drove across the country to a Park Avenue office building and opened fire, killing four people before taking his own life. Police believe the gunman intended to target the National Football League, which is headquartered in the building and which the gunman blamed for the debilitating effects of concussions he sustained while playing high school football.
Unsurprisingly, state and local officials -- including New York Gov. Kathy Hochul -- immediately sought to lay responsibility for the shooting at the feet of Second Amendment advocates and the allegedly "lax" gun laws of other states. Their blame is grossly misplaced.
Nothing about the shooting demonstrates that the rest of the nation needs New York's unconstitutionally restrictive gun laws. Instead, it shows precisely how those restrictive gun laws punish ordinary New Yorkers by forcing them to cede their right to armed self-defense -- leaving them in difficult positions when the government and corporate security measures fail to keep them safe.
Almost every major study -- including the most recent report on the subject by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention -- has found that Americans use their firearms in self-defense between 500,000 and 3 million times annually. In 2021, a professor at the Georgetown McDonough School of Business conducted the most comprehensive study ever on the issue and concluded that roughly 1.6 million defensive gun uses occur in the U.S. every year.
For this reason, The Daily Signal publishes a monthly article highlighting some of the previous month's many news stories on defensive gun use that you may have missed -- or that might not have made it to the national spotlight in the first place. (Read accounts from past months and years here.)
The examples below represent only a small portion of the news stories on defensive gun use during crimes that we found in July. You can explore more using The Heritage Foundation's interactive Defensive Gun Use Database.
As these examples illustrate, when faced with threats of criminal violence, ordinary civilians are far better off when they have ready access to an armed defense than when they're forced to rely solely on the government's intervention.
Instead of blaming Nevada for not implementing laws that wouldn't have made a difference, New York should look at its own restrictive policies, which frequently prevent ordinary people from exercising their right to keep and bear arms precisely when it matters the most.