I don’t have time to find a reliable source for annual justifiable homicides where the defender used a firearm. I will pick a number and we can scale the resulting estimate of how many times people use a firearm annually in righteous self-defense. For this analysis, I am going to assume as a reference point that good people used a firearm for justifiable homicide 1,000 times last year.

I am also going to use reasonable estimates of percentages for how often a defender does NOT have to fire in self-defense, how often a defender DOES have to fire in self-defense, how often a defender who fires hits the attacker, and how often a wounded attacker dies of his/her gunshot wounds.

Reasonable Estimates:
93% of defenders brandish without firing.
7% of defenders pull the trigger.
33% of defenders land shots on attacker if they pulled the trigger.
19% of attackers with gunshot wounds die.

Reasonable Estimate of People Using Firearms Annually in Righteous Self-defense:
Annual self-defense events = 1000 / 0.07 x 0.33 x 0.19
Annual self-defense events = 227,842

As I mentioned, if the number of justifiable homicides is different than 1,000 dead bodies annually, just scale the end result accordingly. For example, if there are only 500 justifiable homicides annually (which is half of my starting point of 1,000), then halve my estimated number of self-defense events from 227,842 down to 113,921. Similarly, if the number of justifiable homicides is twice my starting point of 1,000, then double my estimated number to 455,685 events.

Caveat: there have to be an additional number of justifiable homicides every year which law enforcement fails to categorize as justifiable homicides. In some cases law enforcement, without any useful information on a dead body, rightly assume that the dead body is a murder victim, when in fact the dead body is a violent attacker and the defender remained silent. There are probably additional instances where law enforcement never finds a dead body and thus cannot include them in the tally of justifiable homicides. Whatever that number is, it increases my above estimate of how often people use firearms in righteous self-defense every year.

I published a very reliable estimate on another website based on the number of dead bodies where law enforcement officially declared their demise to be legally justifiable homicide. I also factored in the fatality rate of gunshot wounds which is a well known number without controversy. Finally, I factored in a reasonable estimate of how often a defender would actually have to fire in self-defense and actually strike their attacker (versus the defender convincing their attacker to break-off the attack via brandishing or firing and missing.)

My above estimate pegs the number of times that good people used firearms in righteous self-defense at several hundred thousand times a year.

If I am feeling motivated after morning coffee and breakfast, I will post the analysis here.

Don’t you just love a happy ending?

*Sniff*…