Hollywood May Tell You Differently, but Reality Includes These 12 Examples of Defensive Gun Use

May 08, 2023

Commentary By

Senior Legal Fellow, Meese Center

Summer 2023 Member of the Young Leaders Program at The Heritage Foundation

USC's guidelines may push Hollywood to "change the narrative" on guns, but nothing can change the facts.

The examples below represent only a small portion of the news stories on defensive gun use that we found in May.

These stories don't fit the gun control narrative, but they certainly matter, too. And we will keep telling these stories, even if Hollywood won't.

Last month, the University of Southern California's Hollywood, Health & Society Program published "Trigger Warning: Gun Guidelines for Media," a series of recommendations for the entertainment industry on how it should portray firearms.

Although some of these guidelines offer helpful suggestions, particularly about how the media should deal with the topic of suicide, the publication is aimed largely at motivating Hollywood to stigmatize lawful gun ownership.

The guidelines are highly critical of any attempts to portray the benefits of gun ownership, particularly for victims of domestic violence. They include a section on the "myth" of "the good guy with a gun" and are awash with heavily disputed (and often easily dispelled) talking points manufactured by gun control advocates.

USC's guidelines may push Hollywood to "change the narrative" on guns, but nothing can change the facts—the right to keep and bear arms is a critical component of the natural, unalienable right of self-defense. And peaceable citizens rely on it all the time.

Almost every major study has found that Americans use their firearms in self-defense between 500,000 and 3 million times annually, as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has acknowledged. In 2021, the most comprehensive study ever conducted on the issue concluded that roughly 1.6 million defensive gun uses occur in the United States every year.

For this reason, The Daily Signal publishes a monthly article highlighting some of the previous month's many news stories on defensive gun use that you may have missed—or that might not have made it to the national spotlight in the first place. (Read other accounts here from past months and years. You also may follow @DailyDGU on Twitter for daily highlights of recent defensive gun uses.)

The examples below represent only a small portion of the news stories on defensive gun use that we found in May. You may explore more using The Heritage Foundation's interactive Defensive Gun Use Database. (The Daily Signal is Heritage's multimedia news organization.)

USC's "Trigger Warning" informs leaders in the entertainment industry that "your stories matter" because they can persuade [read: manipulate] viewers when it comes to their opinions on gun control.

Apparently, far less important are the types of real-life stories such as those highlighted above, where peaceable Americans successfully use their firearms to defend their lives and their livelihoods.

These stories don't fit the gun control narrative, but they certainly matter, too.

And we will keep telling these stories, even if Hollywood won't.

This piece originally appeared in The Daily Signal

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