Marine Vet Explains How He Started ‘Good Guy With A Gun Stories’

Situations where firearms are used for personal protection aren’t always reported in the national media, but one influencer is bringing these cases to the surface and explained why in an interview with the Daily Caller News Foundation.

It started as an effort to prove a doubter wrong who claimed that the use of firearms for self-defense never happened. The influencer, who goes by Jake of goodguywithagun.online, a Substack newsletter and social media accounts on X and Facebook, told the DCNF that he hadn’t been much of a “gun guy,” despite serving in the Marines, while admitting an internet debate prompted his daily posts about defensive gun uses.

“I got started on it because I basically am a loudmouth on social media sometimes and somebody told me that there was no way that we had, they told me that the good guy with a gun was a myth and I said, it’s not a myth, it’s just underdocumented,” Jake told the DCNF. “So I said, I will go and I’ll find you examples. So I went out and found for about 100 days, every day I would come back with at least one, sometimes two or more examples of good guys with guns stopping a crime or defending someone or making sure that someone wasn’t a victim and at about the end of 100 days or so, he cried uncle and said I had no idea.”

In one incident, which took place in Rockdale County, Georgia, a man attacked a 30-year-old woman who was with her three children during a dispute while driving. The woman retrieved a gun and wounded the man, who was later apprehended by police after he fled in the car and left the woman and children on the side of the road.

Another incident in Columbia, Maryland, involved a man who attacked and attempted to strangle an 85-year-old couple who lived next door because they were unable to give him a ride. The 85-year-old man eventually retrieved a revolver and shot the assailant in the leg. The assailant later was sentenced to life with all but 60 years suspended after being convicted of attepted murder and assault.

Although he served in the Marine Corps, Jake told the DCNF he had only seen a firearm as a tool, despite receiving “Expert” marksmanship awards for both rifle and pistol. He also said that while DGUs are “under-reported,” he said he didn’t believe that bias among mainstream or corporate outlets was to blame.

“Consider the difference for a moment between what happens when a bad guy with a gun commits a crime and a good guy with a gun has a defensive gun use. A bad guy with a gun is very public, right? Mass shooter or a school shooter or something, a robbery, you see that person’s face on TV, you see their name, they are associated with the gun, which is the instrument that they use to commit violent crime and you empathize with the victim,” Jake said. “So our empathy is with the victim, our antipathy is with the bad guy with the gun.”

“When you have a defensive gun use, you’ll hear about sometimes what that person’s like, what the victim is like, I mean, it’s still the victim, right? The person who used the gun in that case is the victim,” Jake continued. “But you don’t have a face. You can’t associate a face and a name most of the time because their privacy is protected. You hear that, oh, well, there was a 34-year-old man who used a gun to stop a woman from getting abused on the street. Okay, great. Well, I don’t know his name. I don’t know what it looks like. I don’t have a feel for him.”

Jake said he didn’t really get involved in Second Amendment issues until the Supreme Court issued its landmark Heller decision in 2008, adding that he had been stunned by how many people thought the decision was wrong.

“The thing that made the difference to me was actually the Heller decision. That’s the place where I looked around and said, I can’t believe that so many people, so many people who are supposedly intelligent, so many people who are lawyers and theoretically understand what the Constitution means, I can’t believe that so many people were about to let one of our core rights get infringed upon,” Jake said. “So it was really Heller that made me say, guns are very important and even though I may not be part of gun culture, even though I live in the People’s Republic of New York, I want to make sure that that right is protected.”

Multiple studies have provided estimates on the number of times firearms are used for self-defense. Experts told the DCNF that the vast majority of cases do not involve any shots being fired.

“Estimates of defensive gun use vary depending on the questions asked, populations studied, timeframe, and other factors related to study design. The report Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence indicates a range of 500,000 to 2.5 million defensive gun uses each year,” the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website says.

One thing often separating Jake from many online discussions is a sense of sobriety about defensive gun use, especially given some comments that are made involving defensive gun uses.

“I think some people are very much like, yeah, good job, those guys had it coming. There’s a sort of amount of triumphalism and I understand where that’s coming from,” Jake told the DCNF. “I don’t personally glorify death in any way. I think that if you have someone who was killed in the commission of a crime, it would have been better if they had been able to live and repent and be redeemed, you know what I mean? So I definitely cringe a little bit at that, but I know where it’s coming from.”

Jake also explained why he picks up older incidents, often about two years earlier.

“There’s actually two reasons for that. One of them is that you do find occasionally instances of fraud. You find cases where somebody was charged for murder or manslaughter and you want to see those work through the system and you want to see the acquittals,” Jake told the DCNF.

“You want to just be very careful with that stuff,” Jake added. “So anything where I’m going to do the full write up and say, this is a full property for DGU, I want that to be ironclad as much as humanly possible. So that’s the reason I give that a little bit of a gap there, let the legal system work.”

Jake noted his goal wasn’t so much about promoting “gun culture” as it was providing a human face to gun ownership.

“I just think it’s really critical to humanize the face of the gun owner. I remember one time I was in voir dire for a jury trial,” Jake said. “I didn’t get picked for the trial, but one of the things that I saw was the questioning of the other potential jurors about gun rights, pardon me, about guns. You know, one of the people who said ‘I have a gun’ was a kind of a smallish, mousy little woman and thinking about her being the face of gun ownership is really kind of important to me.”

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