How many school shootings so far this year?

Americans know that guns take many innocent lives every year, but many don’t know that guns also save them.

On May 15, an attacker at an apartment complex in Fort Smith, Ark., fatally shot a woman & then fired 93 rounds at other people before a man killed him with a bolt-action rifle. Police said he “likely saved a number of lives in the process.”

On June 30, a 12yo. Louisiana boy used a hunting rifle to stop an armed burglar who was threatening his mother’s life during a home invasion.

On July 4, a Chicago gunman shot into a crowd of people, killing one & wounding two others before a concealed-handgun permit holder shot & wounded the attacker. Police praised him for stepping in.

These are just a few of the nearly 1,000 instances reported by the media so far this year in which gun owners have stopped mass shootings & other murderous acts, saving countless lives. & crime experts say such high-profile cases represent only a small fraction of the instances in which guns are used defensively.

Americans who look only at the daily headlines would be surprised to learn that, according to academic estimates, defensive gun uses – including instances when guns are simply shown to deter a crime – are four to five times more common than gun crimes, & far more frequent than the roughly 20,000 murders or fewer each year, with or without a gun. But even when they prevent mass public shootings, defensive uses rarely get national news coverage.

“Nobody who has done their homework on defensive gun use could possibly believe reading news articles accurately captures anything but an infinitesimal share of DGUs,” Tomislav Kovandzic, an associate professor of criminology at the University of Texas at Dallas, told RealClearInvestigations. “The only way to measure defensive gun uses is with surveys. While there is no such thing as a perfect measure of anything, the fact that they consistently show large numbers of defensive gun uses can’t be ignored.”

The Department of Justice’s National Crime Victimization Survey indicates that around 100,000 defensive gun uses occur each year – an estimate that, though it may seem like a lot, is actually much lower than 17 other surveys.

These other surveys screen respondents by asking if they have been threatened with violence (by contrast with the DOJ’s survey, which asks if they have been the victims of a crime). This produces more self-acknowledged defensive gun users, since someone who successfully brandished a gun is less likely to self-characterize as a crime victim. Survey data indicate that in 95% of cases when people use guns defensively, they merely show the gun to make the criminal back off.

Such DGUs rarely make the news, though a few do. In March, a man police described as “armed & dangerous” attempted to rob a home in Smith County, Texas. The homeowner pulled a gun & the intruder “fled away on foot.” The criminal had shot a woman the night before & had previous “outstanding warrants for aggravated assault with a deadly weapon &felon in possession of a firearm.”

In May, in Ogden, Utah, a stranger grabbed an 11-year-old girl on a school playground. An armed teacher ran outside & confronted the suspect, giving the girl the chance to pull away from the attacker. The teacher held the man at gunpoint until police arrived.

“Media stories cannot be trusted to accurately reflect the number or type of defensive gun uses that actually occur,” Professor Gary Mauser of Canada’s Simon Fraser University told RCI. Mauser has conducted national surveys on defensive gun use. “National surveys find that firearms are rarely fired when used to stop a violent attack,” he said. “Such cases are unlikely to be reported to the police, & even less likely to be found in media stories.”

Many leading outfits rely on the Gun Violence Archive to track firearm use. The GVA, however, relies primarily on news reports. Through this unvirtuous circle, the public learns of the most extreme cases, which academic research suggests is actually a fraction of gun uses.

RealClearInvestigations examined Gun Violence Archive data from Jan. 1 to Aug. 10 of this year, & found 774 defensive gun uses, fully 85% involving people shot: 43% resulting in death & 42% percent in wounding. Less than 4% of cases involved no shots fired.

Experts interviewed by RCI said this coverage makes defensive gun uses appear as if they end in fatalities or woundings at much higher rates than they actually do.

Many crimes also go unreported, so it is likely that many defensive gun uses are never known to the police, & thus unknown to the media. Numbers from the Bureau of Justice Statistics show that less than half of violent crime victims report violent crime to police.

But even dramatic cases that get local news coverage – [b]cases in which mass public shootings were prevented – dont receive national news coverage. The Crime Prevention Research Center has compiled a number of examples over the last year, but many Americans have probably never heard of them since they attracted only local media coverage.