• Posted March 19, 2025

Firearms Rarely Used For Protection Against Crime

People often say they own a gun to protect themselves and their families.

But firearms owners rarely use their weapon in self-defense, a new study says.

An overwhelming majority of gun owners -- 92% -- say they’ve never used their weapons to defend themselves, according to findings published March 14 in JAMA Network Open.

Less than 1% said they’d used their gun for protection within the previous year, results show.

“Adults with firearm access are far more likely to be exposed to gun violence than they are to defend themselves with their firearms,” lead researcher Michael Anestis, executive director of the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center at Rutgers University, said in a news release.

“It’s not that defensive gun use never happens, but the notion that firearm owners are routinely saving their own lives or those of their loved ones by using a firearm in self-defense simply is not backed up by the data,” Anestis continued.

For the study, his team surveyed more than 8,000 adults across the United States, of whom about 3,000 had access to firearms.

Results show that exposure to gun violence far outpaces use of a firearm in self-defense.

Only 0.7% of people with a gun said they’d either warned someone about their firearm or brandished it in self-defense within the past year, results show.

Likewise, only 0.3% of gun owners had fired in the vicinity of a threat and 0.2% at a perceived threat, the study says.

On the other hand, more than one-third (34%) of survey participants said they had known someone who’d killed themselves with a gun. Likewise, 33% said they’d heard gunshots in their neighborhood.

The findings also showed that people with direct exposure to gun violence were more likely to pull a gun defensively.

Although only 2% of survey participants had been shot, they represented 60% of all instances in which a person defensively shot at a perceived threat, results show. 

People also were more likely to have engaged in defensive gun use if they’d been exposed to gun violence, carry firearms more frequently, and tend to store their guns loaded and unlocked, researchers said.

“If individuals themselves have experienced gun violence or they more frequently have quick and ready access to their firearms, they may be more prone to perceiving threats and responding through the use of their firearm,” Anestis said. 

“It is important to note that, just because someone perceives someone else as a threat does not mean they were one and, if someone truly is a threat, that does not always mean a firearm is necessary for defense,” he added. “When defensive gun use occurs, we should not necessarily conclude that the result was a life saved that otherwise would have been lost.”

More information

The Pew Research Center has more about gun deaths in the U.S.

SOURCE: Rutgers University, news release, March 14, 2025