A doughnut shop owner in Fort Worth, Texas, was busy mixing the next day’s dough early Friday morning when a burglar wearing a ski mask and carrying what looked like a rifle broke into the store, grabbed the owner, and demanded money. The owner briefly got away and ran outside to the outside of the business but was stopped when the burglar hit her on the head with the rifle, which police later determined was a BB gun. The burglar grabbed the cash drawer and the shop owner’s car keys and was attempting to start the owner’s car to flee when a neighbor armed with a gun stopped him. The neighbor fired once, fatally shooting the burglar, who had an almost thirty year long criminal history.(www.star-telegram.com), TX. 5/12/08)

During the decades the American Rifleman has published “The Armed Citizen” column, thousands of incidents of law-abiding Americans using firearms to halt or prevent crime have appeared in the magazine. Editorial space allowing, the total could have been far greater of course, as award-winning survey research shows that each year in the U.S. gun owners use firearms for protection as frequently as 2.5 million times.

This archive contains “Armed Citizen” entries from the present back to 1958. The database is searchable by key word and state and results are displayed in chronological order according to the month of publication in the American Rifleman.