Gun owners do not carry firearms only because violent criminals exist. Bears, mountain lions, feral dogs, rabid animals and other four-legged threats do not care about gun-control politics—and they do not wait for police or animal-control officers to arrive.
A newly published national firearms survey from Georgetown University professor William English estimates that Americans use firearms defensively against animal threats roughly 180,000 times every year.
English’s new 2026 National Firearms Survey is a detailed, 75-page follow-up to his widely cited 2021 work. The survey began with 51,398 American adults and identified 16,688 respondents as gun owners through a two-stage validation process.
The paper estimates approximately 2.2 million defensive firearm incidents annually. According to English, 8.4% of those incidents involved animal threats rather than criminal threats. Depending on which rounded annual estimate in the paper is used, that works out to approximately 176,000 to 185,000 incidents, or roughly 180,000 defensive gun uses against animals each year. That is not an insignificant category of armed self-defense.
When Ten Rounds May Not Be Enough
Several examples of verbatim responses regarding defensive firearm use directed at animals are included in Appendix H. These were specifically taken from responses where the respondents were asked:
“Have you ever been in a situation (including any referenced in earlier responses) in which it would have been useful for defensive purposes to have a firearm with a magazine capacity in excess of 10 rounds? If so, please briefly describe that situation.”
There were 2,386 individuals who answered positively. Most of those are reported as giving a description of the situation. The paper quotes 33 responses to illustrate what was reported to them. Of the 33 responses, 7 involved defenses against animals, somewhat higher than the number reported in the overall survey. Here are three from the paper:
- Going hunting a cougar came up on me and I fired 15 shots for it to go away
- When a dog with rabies was attacking my livestock and would not go down even after several shots and reloading
- We had an aggressive bear come onto our property and was going after animals. had a Glock 9mm had to use 2 clips
Defensive Gun Uses the News Never Reports
As a researcher and writer who has devoted considerable time to detailing the usefulness of handguns in defense against bears, it was gratifying to see William English include animal defenses as a significant, if not large, portion of the defensive use of firearms. One of the more common defenses against animals that this correspondent has observed in media reports is against aggressive, often feral dogs. This correspondent has had several close calls with aggressive dogs. On one occasion, a Glock 17 was drawn, but fortunately, it was not required to be fired.
Dogs are much more aggressive when acting as a pack. Attacking animals tend to be very sensitive to how confident the potential “prey” acts. The availability of a firearm increases the confidence of the person who has it, thus decreasing the chances of an attack. The more confident the person with the firearm is in their ability to use it, the less likely they are to use it.
At the Supreme Court, Justice Anthony Kennedy asked counsel if the right to keep and bear arms:
“had nothing to do with the concern of the remote settler to defend himself and his family against hostile Indian tribes and outlaws, wolves and bears and grizzlies and things like that?”
The survey by William English definitively shows that defense against animal attack is not a dead letter. The estimate of 2.1 million defensive uses of firearms per year a conservative number in the survey. 8.4% of those would be about 176 thousand defensive uses against animals in the United States every year. Criminal uses of firearms where the person was victimized were about 1.8 per thousand since 2008. Defensive use of firearms against animals is about .54 per thousand, or nearly a third as many. Defensive uses of firearms in total are about 6.4 per thousand or 3.5 times as many as successful victimizations.
The stories that reach the headlines are when people are injured or killed. Bear attacks where people are injured make headlines. Attacks by rabid skunks, coyotes, foxes, or bobcats in rural areas may make local news. The common successful defenses, when no person has been injured, seldom make the news.
Cartridge firearms make humans the top-level predator on the planet. Nothing else comes close. When animals prey on humans where cartridge firearms are common, the animals are quickly killed. The defensive use of firearms against attacking animals is not controversial. Many people in urban centers are unaware that such defenses occur on a regular basis.
The well-designed and executed survey by William English goes a long way toward providing information for those ignorant of the phenomenon.
About Dean Weingarten:
Dean Weingarten has been a peace officer, a military officer, was on the University of Wisconsin Pistol Team for four years, and was first certified to teach firearms safety in 1973. He taught the Arizona concealed carry course for fifteen years until the goal of Constitutional Carry was attained. He has degrees in meteorology and mining engineering, and retired from the Department of Defense after a 30 year career in Army Research, Development, Testing, and Evaluation.
