Despite the mainstream media drumbeat, guns are used far more often to prevent crime than to commit crime in the United States.

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Well, we’ve apparently reached a point where the political left has rendered satire and reality effectively indistinguishable. 

Consider that over the past week, leftists have gone from maligning law-abiding parishioners in Texas who stopped a church shooting, to sympathizing with the murderous Iranian regime and its militant leader with the blood of hundreds of American troops on his hands. 

It all serves to recall the dystopian Rolling Stones lyric from “Sympathy for the Devil” in which Mick Jagger sings, “All the cops are criminals, and all the sinners saints.” 

On Sunday morning of December 29, a deranged gunman interrupted service at the West Freeway Church of Christ near Fort Worth, Texas and opened fire upon congregants.  Almost instantly, however, multiple parishioners began returning fire, and quickly killed the gunman.  What might’ve been a massacre of dozens – approximately 250 people were in attendance – instead resulted in just one churchgoer killed and the gunman quickly dropped in his tracks. 

What brought instant nationwide notoriety to the event was the fact that the church was live-streaming that service, so it was all caught on video.  Accordingly, we all witnessed an unforgettable “good guy with a gun” event, which in turn made it instantly more difficult for gun control advocates to dismiss the value of the Second Amendment’s individual right to keep and bear arms. 

It also didn’t hurt that President Trump tweeted recognition and praise to the lifesaving parishioners: 

Armed congregants quickly stopped a crazed church shooter in Texas.  If it were not for the fact that there were people inside of the church that were both armed, and highly proficient in using their weapon, the end result would have been catastrophic.  A big THANK YOU to them! 

It’s also worth noting that one day earlier, five Jewish worshipers were injured in a stabbing attack at a Hanukkah service near New York City. 

Leftist gun-control extremists, however, were not so ready to celebrate. 

For instance, failed Democratic Senate and 2020 presidential candidate and full-time sophomoric laughingstock Robert “Beto” O’Rourke tweeted, “Clearly what we are doing in Texas, what we are doing in this country, when it comes to guns is not working.” 

Apparently he prefers conditions in places like Chicago or Baltimore with tighter gun-control laws than Texas. 

And then there was Christian Heyne, vice president at the Brady gun control group, who said, “At the end of the day we shouldn’t be celebrating the fact that a bunch of churchgoers went into a house of worship and saw people die.”  

No, Mr. Heyne, but we should be celebrating that armed law-abiding citizens, whom you and your organization seek to strip of their right to keep and bear arms, stopped what otherwise would’ve been a far worse massacre by exercising their Second Amendment rights. 

It’s also important to understand that this event was no anomaly in American life.  Despite the mainstream media drumbeat, guns are used far more often to prevent crime than to commit crime in the United States. 

That’s according to the Center for Disease Control (CDC), which Barack Obama tasked with reviewing firearm use and violence in 2012.  Had Obama known what they’d ultimately find, he’d have buried the idea.  Specifically, it determined that firearms are used between a minimum 500,000 times and 3 million times per year for defensive purposes: 

Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns (i.e., incidents in which a gun was ‘used’ by the crime victim in the sense of attacking or threatening an offender) have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies…  Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year. 

To put that number in proper perspective, firearms are used approximately 11,000 times each year to commit murder in the U.S.   Thus, even according to the CDC’s lowest, safest estimate, guns are used fifty times as often to prevent crime than to commit murder. 

It’s also important to highlight that the U.S. murder rate has been plummeting over the same period during which firearm possession in the U.S. has skyrocketed. 

According to the CDC and Congressional Research Service, there were approximately 0.94 firearms per person in America in 1993.  At that time, the U.S. murder rate stood at approximately 7.0 per 100,000 people.  Two decades later, however, the U.S. firearms possession rate had increased to 1.45 per person, whereas the murder rate fell by approximately 50% to 3.6 per 100,000 people. 

The numbers don’t lie.  There are millions upon millions of “good guys with a gun” across America.  Jack Wilson and the other heroes at West Freeway Church of Christ in Texas offer just the latest vivid illustration.