Mayor LaGrand’s Epic Fail: Defensive Gun Use Data Destroys the Narrative
Opinion
Just when you thought you’d heard it all: warning—reading the teachings of Grand Rapids Mayor David LaGrand, who just delivered the comedy gold of 2026 at his “Mayor Monday” forum, may cause you to experience dizziness, confusion, and an uncontrollable urge to buy another gun just to spite this level of nonsense. Void of common sense, after a selfdefense police shooting of yet another illegally armed felon, the mayor decides the crisis demands… shaming lawful gun owners.
LaGrand stated, “I think as a community we need to start having some shaming around gun possession.” LaGrand continued, “I think if you’ve got a gun you should be ashamed of yourself. I really do.” He then blesses us with his profound insight that guns are “for killing human beings,” and argues there is “so much more harm than benefit,” all while barely whispering “Second Amendment” like it’s an embarrassing family secret.
Remarkable. Historic. A living reminder that you can reach a high office without ever once landing on a coherent thought.
But let’s play along with his little shame game for a second. If owning a gun is so shameful, Mr. Mayor, then explain why the “good guy with a gun” keeps showing up in the data as a major check on the very violence you’re pretending to care about.
Defensive gun uses (DGUs) are not a fringe myth. They’re a constant reality, and the numbers make LaGrand’s hot take look like a hallucination. Even the low-end estimates from government victimization surveys land around tens of thousands per year, while other credible work puts defensive uses far higher.
Economist John Lott has spent decades digging into this, and his work points in exactly the opposite direction of the mayor’s feelings. In More Guns, Less Crime and later analyses, Lott points to survey data indicating somewhere between roughly 760,000 and 3.6 million defensive uses per year, with most of them ending the moment a gun is shown, not fired. His article and later congressional testimony on DGUs lay out 18 separate surveys with an average near the 2 million mark.
Want more, Mr. Mayor? Gary Kleck’s review of the CDC’s own buried survey work shows that when they quietly asked people about using guns defensively in the 1990s, the results implied well over a million defensive uses per year, numbers so inconvenient the agency stopped talking about them.
Add in the 2021 National Firearms Survey, which estimates about 1.67 million defensive gun uses annually, with guns used to stop assaults, robberies, home invasions, and more, and a clear picture emerges.
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Across multiple surveys, multiple decades, and multiple researchers, the defensive use figures routinely range from hundreds of thousands to a couple of million incidents a year. At that point, pretending the “good guy with a gun” doesn’t exist isn’t just ignorance, it’s its own weird little conspiracy theory.
The “good guy with a gun” is not a bumper sticker slogan; it is a statistical reality that saves lives every single day.
Zoom in on Michigan, and the picture gets even more inconvenient for the mayor’s narrative. Michigan’s shift to “shall issue” concealed carry did not produce the bloodbath opponents predicted. One summary of state data, including before-and-after trends, can be seen here.
Over the decade after the law was liberalized, firearm homicides in Michigan actually declined compared to the decade before, even as the number of residents holding concealed pistol licenses exploded. Other analyses of permit holders’ behavior consistently show that concealed pistol license holders are dramatically less likely to be involved in crime than the general population, offending at a tiny fraction of the general rate.
So, who exactly deserves “shame,“ the law-abiding citizen who deters crime at a rate far out of proportion to their tiny share of offenders, or the violent felon who ignores every law on the books?
LaGrand wants to shame the very people who quietly deter crime without a badge or a paycheck, while the actual criminals, the felony-prohibited possessors, keep arming up illegally. Blame the responsible citizens who stop violence, ignore the prohibited felons released back onto the streets who cause it. That’s not policy; that’s political theater, that’s insanity.
His cigarette analogy is equally absurd. Cigarettes kill passively and provide no protective benefit to the innocent. Firearms in lawful hands actively prevent harm, protect the vulnerable women facing stalkers, the elderly in high-crime areas, minorities tired of being easy targets, and do so on a scale that, by many estimates, dwarfs criminal uses. Again, see the self-defense statistics and survey discussions above for the ranges and methodologies.
And then there’s that pesky Constitution. The Supreme Court in District of Columbia v. Heller and New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen has made it abundantly clear: the Second Amendment protects an individual right to keep and bear arms for self-defense. That is not a suggestion, and it’s not contingent on whether a mayor in Michigan happens to “feel” you should be ashamed. It is a recognized, fundamental right.
To every responsible gun owner in Grand Rapids and beyond: keep doing what you’re doing. You are not the problem. You are part of the solution the mayor refuses to acknowledge because it doesn’t fit his narrative, and the evidence backs you up.
Mayor LaGrand should sit down and ask himself why he’s attacking people who obey the law instead of the thugs who terrorize his city. The real disgrace isn’t gun owners; it’s a mayor so out of touch he thinks shaming citizens for exercising a constitutional right counts as policy. Carry on, folks. The good guys are still winning the day, whether the mayor likes it or not.
Law-abiding Americans should not hang their heads because a grandstanding mayor sneers at their rights; they should do exactly what the Founders expected of a free people: stay armed, stay trained, and be ready to defend themselves and their neighbors when evil shows up.
The men who insisted on writing the Second Amendment into the fabric of our Constitution did it precisely so that ordinary citizens, not just kings, bureaucrats, or mayors, would hold the ultimate responsibility for their own safety and their own liberty. To honor the rights they secured and the blood that has been shed to preserve them, we have a duty to stand firm against petty politicians like the mayor of Grand Rapids, who would strip away the very freedoms our Founders engraved into America’s founding documents 250 years ago and entrusted us to defend.
When you carry a firearm lawfully, you’re not just protecting your family in a dark parking lot, you’re carrying forward a 250-year-old promise that this country would never be a place where only the government has guns. That’s not something to be ashamed of, that’s something to live up to and to fight for as long as the Republic stands.
Still Armed, Still Free: The Citizen Militia Endures as the Founders Intended
About Sean Maloney
Sean Maloney is a criminal defense attorney, co-founder of Second Call Defense, and an NRA-certified firearms instructor. He is a nationally recognized speaker on critical topics, including the Second Amendment, self-defense, the use of lethal force, and concealed carry. Sean has worked on numerous use-of-force and self-defense cases and has personally trained hundreds of civilians to respond safely and legally to life-threatening situations. He is a passionate advocate for restoring the cultural legitimacy of the Second Amendment and promoting personal responsibility in self-defense.
