It’s the stuff nightmares are made of.
On Sunday, a gunman stormed into the morning service at CrossPointe Community Church in Wayne, Michigan. As children attended Vacation Bible School, the shooter, wearing a tactical vest and armed with two guns and a dozen loaded magazines, opened fire. He wounded a security guard before being fatally shot by two congregation members who volunteer on a church security team.
Details are still emerging, but local police on Sunday praised the responders as heroes who “undoubtedly saved many lives and prevented a large-scale mass shooting.”
We’ll never know how many lives were saved, but the episode evidences what gun control advocates often forget: Firearms prevent countless crimes every day in the United States.
Defensive gun use deters crime and prevents it. Precisely how many crimes are stopped every year through defensive gun use is unknown, but the most cited academic study estimates 2.5 million instances of defensive gun use every year in the U.S. — 6,700 every day.
The Heritage Foundation, which tracks confirmed cases of firearms used in self-defense, says the number could be even higher. But criminologist Gary Kleck (co-author of the widely cited defensive gun use study that produced the 2.5 million annual figure) has since revised his estimate downward to roughly one million uses per year.
Academics can debate how many crimes are averted by defensive gun use every year — 2.5 million, a million, 500,000 — but firearms clearly don’t just claim lives. They also save lives.
Many gun control advocates, politicians, and members of the media prefer to ignore that reality. The simple, preferred narrative is that guns are bad, and people who oppose gun bans are personally responsible for violent gun crimes.
“How many more children have to be murdered,” asked White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre following a high-profile 2023 mass shooting, “before Republicans in Congress will step up and act to pass the Assault Weapons Ban?”
Such rhetoric overlooks the reality that firearms are a tool, one that can be used for harm, but also for protection.
Millions of people rely on guns each year to defend themselves, their families, and their property. Ignoring the lived experiences of law-abiding citizens who use guns to stop crimes distorts the public conversation.
Police have a role to play in crime prevention, but the notion that citizens don’t need firearms to protect themselves because police can is a myth.
For starters, the average emergency response time for police is more than nine minutes in major metros, including New York, Atlanta, Houston, Detroit, and Denver. If a citizen is actually able to call police while a violent crime is underway, chances are the incident will be over long before help arrives. In those critical first moments, whether it’s a home invasion, assault, or armed robbery, citizens often must fend for themselves.
Secondly, the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that police have no specific obligation to protect individuals, even if they see a crime in progress.
Finally, author Richard Stevens has pointed out that many police officers themselves will tell you they’re better at catching bad guys than stopping bad guys.
“Police do very little to prevent violent crime,” says Richard Mack, a former sheriff of Graham County, Arizona. “We investigate crime after the fact.”
This is why so many law enforcement leaders say individuals must be able to protect themselves from violent crime. The vast majority of violent crimes involve the use of a weapon — more than 90%, according to the FBI — and firearms are the most effective deterrent most people have to protect themselves (and others) from violent perpetrators.
Again, these facts are unwelcome to those who believe violence can be solved by politicians passing stricter gun control laws. But the hard truth is this: Violence is part of human nature, and central planners cannot legislate it out of existence. No matter how clever the legal wording or how strict the regulation, some people will defy them to commit an act of evil, as a 31-year-old gunman attempted to do on Sunday.
Brian Browning, from Romulus, was identified as the thwarted shooter at CrossPointe Community Church. His motive for the attack is not known, and we may never know. But one thing is clear: Untold numbers of people would be dead today if not for two armed citizens who took Browning down.
Most people will never hear of the mass shooting that didn’t happen. It’s unlikely to get significant time on 60 Minutes or CNN.
That’s a shame, because the heroic response shows that gun violence in America is a more complex problem than many care to admit and that the real antidote to violent crime may not be new laws that infringe on individual rights, but a culture that protects them and empowers individuals.
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“You are your own first responder,” Jay Trombley, one of the two members of CrossPointe Community Church who neutralized Browning, told ABC News. “You are the first person on scene.”
Amen.
Jon Miltimore is senior editor at the American Institute for Economic Research. Follow him on Substack.