“The person who really screws things up is a good guy with a gun,” says an attractive female cop in an episode of ABC's The Rookie. The remark is no coincidence, nor is it simply inspired by Hollywood's notorious left-wing leanings. Rather, gun control groups freely admit to working with screenwriters and producers to shape the dialogue. One group boasts of having “'affiliations' and 'script consultations' with Hollywood,” journalist John Stossel tells me.
The reality is that “good guys with guns” often stop would-be mass murderers. But the stories don't usually make it into the national media. And the FBI sometimes doesn't even record these cases. They “slip up.” Why? When criminal justice researcher John Lott Jr. asked FBI officials about this, he got some interesting answers. “Well, I'm a Democrat,” was one of them.
All of this and more is contained in a new investigative report by Stossel titled, “The FBI and Media Are Not Telling You How Many Lives Guns Save.”
The truth is in the crosshairs
Stossel begins the report by explaining how entertainment and the media use propaganda and select “experts” to spread anti-gun propaganda, noting that, of course, mass shootings get huge coverage in the news, but when a potential mass shooting is thwarted by good people with guns, it gets ignored.
Consider this: the horrific Pulse nightclub shooting in Florida in 2016 took 49 lives and made national headlines. Yet a similar attack at a nightclub in South Carolina just a week later drew almost no reaction. What's the difference?
Only a few people were killed before a “good guy with a gun” took down the shooter.
No, we don't know how many people the bad guys would have massacred if they hadn't been stopped. What we do know is that
He still had about 125 bullets left in his gun when he was stopped.
Not a one-time event
In another incident, which occurred a few months after the 2018 Parkland, Florida mass shooting that shook the nation (17 victims), a man opened fire at an elementary school event in Titusville, Florida. There were hundreds of people there, but a person carrying a concealed firearm lawfully stopped the shooter before he killed innocent people. Don't be surprised if your local news doesn't report this incident; there are plenty more like it.
Oh, and by the way, the FBI “missed” that case.
The department also overlooked the case of Raul Mendez, who in 2022 was at a party in Arizona with his pregnant wife when a crazed gunman opened fire on them. Mendez fired four shots to neutralize the threat, almost certainly saving lives, even though he was shot himself.
Stossel asked the FBI why these incidents and many others were not on the record. The FBI responded that its data “is not intended to examine every mass shooting incident, but rather to provide a basic understanding.” Or should it be called a “misunderstanding”? After all, how can people get a clear picture about defensive gun use if a piece of the puzzle is omitted? Stossel's report can be found below.
What will happen to the children?
Other cases of successful gun defenses occur frequently and are not hard to find. Here are 12: And sometimes the defender is just a “good kid with a gun.”
Consider the case of Kendra St. Clair, an Oklahoma resident who was 12 years old when, home alone in 2012, she shot a 32-year-old intruder with her mother's .40-caliber Glock, then fled the scene. Kendra was frightened and crying, but unharmed.
Another incident in 2010 involved an 11-year-old boy in Palmview, Texas, who was confronted by two armed, masked illegal immigrants who had invaded his home with his mother. Despite being shot in the hip, the boy managed to return fire with a .22-caliber rifle. After one of the assailants was shot in the neck, both men fled the scene.
Of course, if Kendra had been raped and murdered, or the boy tortured and murdered, the story might have been big news, and with an honest media, it might have been big news.
And perhaps cases of children using guns in defense are covered up to expose the truth. We often hear about “kids killed by guns” and the “kids” are usually teenage gang members. But guns are known as the “great equalizer,” especially when it comes to children. Realistically, how else could a young child fight off an adult male criminal?
No great results
But even if every incident involving a gun fired in self-defense were properly reported and recorded, the truth would still not be told, because the gun's reputation takes precedence.
Consider the 2011 story of 11-year-old Alyssa Gutierrez of Albuquerque. When three teenage burglars broke into her home, she simply grabbed her mother's (pink!) rifle and the robbers fled. Unusual?
Not according to criminologist Gary Kleck, a Democrat and member of the ACLU. He once estimated that 2.5 million Americans use a gun in self-defense each year. And as in Gutierrez's case, many of these cases involve potential victims who deter criminals simply by showing them a gun. And, as he found, “assaults and robberies are less likely to occur when victims have a gun,” ThoughtCo writes.
Leftists also tacitly accept this obvious conclusion: if good guys with guns are ineffective, why worry about bad guys with guns? Why could bad guys be more effective? And if bad guys with guns can kill good guys, why can't good guys with guns kill them in the first place?
Are all the bad guys super-brilliant geniuses and all the good guys incompetent idiots?
Finally, consider the confessions heard in a hidden video sting operation targeting pro-gun control journalists in New York in 2013. When asked if they would put up a sign on their property stating, “This Home is Proudly Gun Free,” all balked. In their introduction, one journalist even said they worried they were “inviting people with guns.”
Yes, they all clearly believe that “good guys with guns” are no deterrent.
