As cities across the country reel from explosive crime rates, many politicians at the local, state, and federal levels are too preoccupied with disarming peaceable American gun owners to identify, arrest, and prosecute actual criminals adequately.

Two masked attackers met their match last month when they attacked Los Angeles resident Vince Ricci as he walked toward the front door of his house. The pair brandished a firearm at Ricci, who pulled out his own gun and shot at the thugs, who ran away.

Ricci successfully defended not only himself but his wife and baby daughter, who were inside.

Like millions of other Americans, Ricci is a law-abiding gun owner who carries a firearm for protection.

Well, he used to be.

After the attack, the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department suspended Ricci’s concealed carry permit for reasons that are still unclear. His attackers were still at large, and he said he worries that his family will “become a statistic” because of this unfair treatment as a crime victim.

Despite repeated attempts by gun control advocates to downplay the importance of armed self-defense, successful defensive gun uses such as Ricci’s actions are far from a rare occurrence. 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 X, formerly Twitter, for daily highlights of defensive gun uses.)

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

From Chicago and Philadelphia to Issaquah, Washington, and Shady Cove, Oregon, ordinary Americans routinely use their firearms to defend themselves, their homes, and their families.

In many of these instances, the victims either had orders of protection against their attacker, or the attacker otherwise had a clear history of violent, criminal behavior. In one incident, another crime had been committed in the same area less than a week earlier.

If law enforcement can’t keep people safe, especially from a demonstrated threat, it is up to ordinary Americans to exercise their Second Amendment rights to protect themselves and their loved ones.

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