Defensive gun use numbers are hotly contested, but low-end estimates are in the hundreds of thousands of instances per year in the US source 1, source 2. Those numbers include times when simply pulling a gun was enough to stop a situation from escalating into a overt violence. Obviously people that oppose 2A civil rights wish to downplay defensive firearm use as a way to prevent violence, and people that support 2A civil rights want to champion those numbers. Per my second source, it is disputed that those instances of defensive gun use ‘saved lives’–many of them might have been used to e.g. scare off burglars–but there’s it’s harder to dispute that defensive gun use is quite high. It should also be obvious that it’s impossible to know whether a life would have been lost or not without defensive gun use; there’s no reasonable way to know if, for instance, a home invasion robbery would have turned into a murder if you were unarmed.
Defensive gun use numbers are hotly contested, but low-end estimates are in the hundreds of thousands of instances per year in the US source 1, source 2. Those numbers include times when simply pulling a gun was enough to stop a situation from escalating into a overt violence. Obviously people that oppose 2A civil rights wish to downplay defensive firearm use as a way to prevent violence, and people that support 2A civil rights want to champion those numbers. Per my second source, it is disputed that those instances of defensive gun use ‘saved lives’–many of them might have been used to e.g. scare off burglars–but there’s it’s harder to dispute that defensive gun use is quite high. It should also be obvious that it’s impossible to know whether a life would have been lost or not without defensive gun use; there’s no reasonable way to know if, for instance, a home invasion robbery would have turned into a murder if you were unarmed.