PrimeWire

Victimization surveys show that IF you’re attacked, resistance with a gun is the safest response, the least likely course of action to result in injury to the person being attacked.

So how do we explain the kind of result you’re referring to? Simple: your data source is reversing cause and effect and ignoring a selection bias.

The cause/effect issue is that if people who know they are unusually likely to be attacked (drug dealers, gang members, people who’ve received violent threats, people who work in especially dangerous areas…) tend to go out and obtain a gun for defense, then having obtained a gun will APPEAR to be associated with attack likelihood even though it actually makes the attacked person safer to have one.

The selection bias issue comes from how the stats were generated. In places where open carry is illegal or highly conspicuous and frowned upon (that is, most of the US) we tend to only DISCOVER that someone was carrying a gun BECAUSE that someone got shot or killed. If they hadn’t been shot or killed they would have been able to keep their gun concealed and leave the scene without being arrested or investigated so the fact of their having brought a gun to the scene wouldn’t be in the police report, hence wouldn’t make it into the sort of study you’re thinking of (which is based on aggregating police report statistics).