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As for those clever and dexterous criminals who can snatch a loaded firearm from a defender's handthe ones you always hear about from the gun-ban crowda quaint irony presents itself. In this analysis, the opposite is far more common. Among the surveyed incidents, a defender's gun was taken away and used against him or her only seven times. Criminals' guns were used against them nearly 200 times! (Note that research methods used to filter news stories for shootings do not bias the tally either way.)

Who Shoots?
Many news agencies decline to identify the defenders in order to protect their identity, concealing even the gender. From stories that did identify, the vast majority in our analysis were males, with only 11 percent of shooters being women. (Coupled with this is the fact that 95 percent of offenders were male.) Senior citizens, defined as persons over the age of 65, used firearms in their own defense 171 times (around 5 percent of total uses).

Many anti-gun advocates would grudgingly allow ownership of rifles and shotguns if they could ban all handguns. Armed citizens, however, beg to differ. Of stories identifying defender firearms, 79 percent involved handguns. Shotguns were used only 15 percent of the time, and rifles 6 percent. The message is clear: Banning handguns would remove the most common means of self-defense for most people.

Earlier we stated that bullets did not always find their mark in armed exchanges. However, hit ratios for civilians may actually be much higher than for law enforcement personnel.

In confrontational shootings, studies show police hit their targets between 13 percent and 25 percent of the time. Of the incidents analyzed in this study, civilians hit their targets 84 percent of the time. This comparison does not account for the number of shots fired, only hits or misses. Nevertheless, it gives us a statistical basis to refute claims that only police should have firearms or that civilian shooters are largely ineffective in emergencies.

Conclusion
In many ways, the story of Jacksie King embodies the exact reason why firearms must always be accessible to citizens. Pacifists, anti-gun activists and critics reading self-defense stories will nearly always claim that retreating, calling the police or even letting the criminals rob you is better than shooting because "it's not worth your life."

For an elderly grandmother in Illinois, all of those excuses were stripped away. She could not call the police. She could not flee. Clearly she couldn't physically resist the younger, stronger intruder. All other safety precautions were useless.

It was only her and a hardened criminal that night, and only one could come out of the episode unscathed. There was no recourse but to shoot.

Few would dare to say that King should not have fired in her own defense that night. But regardless of a citizen's identity, condition or demographics, no one should ever deprive a free citizen of the God-given right to self-defense.