How many times were guns used to successfully protect a person/ family from harm?
I wonder how many weren’t really ‘accidents’.
Most surveys find that firearms are used in defense or to stop a crime from 700,000 to 3 million times each year in the United States.
Most of the time, the gun does not have to be fired. They are fired in defense or to stop a crime about 5-10% of the time, but someone is actually hit only perhaps 1 percent of the time, and killed perhaps 1/10 of a percent of the time.
So, 1-3 million defensive or crime preventing uses of guns would translate to perhaps 700-3000 dead criminals a year.
That would seem plausible given that about 10,000 firearms homicides occur in the United States each year, and no particular statistics are tracked to keep good records that differentiate between self defense homicides and illegal homicides.
That figure is essentially unquantifiable, since a firearm may in some cases protect a person/family from harm without the person/family being aware of it. Indeed, sometimes a non-existent firearm can provide such protection (e.g. if a crook decides against attacking someone someone he thinks is 'probably' armed). One might attempt to estimate how often such things occur by, e.g., interviewing former crooks who have gone straight, but I would not expect such estimates to be particularly accurate or meaningful.
One thing that a lot of anti-gun people don't seem to grasp, though, is that crooks aren't interested in getting into gunfights with people who would otherwise leave them alone (crooks do get into gunfights with other crooks, but that's an entirely different matter). A crook who gets the jump on someone carrying a concealed weapon might have a 90% chance of "winning" if he makes a surprise attack, but the 90% chance of surviving the encounter isn't nearly as good as the 100% chance of surviving an "encounter" where he doesn't attack at all.