Its only anecdotal, but I can't recall ever hearing a news story about guns doing something helpful.

[petronius]

32. There have been attempts, through means other than analysis of media

reports, to estimate the number of defensive ('good') gun uses that occur - these estimates vary pretty widely, and are plagued by the what-ifs (even in a real defensive use, there's no way of knowing what would have happened without the firearm being present). But it does seem clear that 'good' uses do occur, even if they're largely absent in the media.

For example, here's a source (see page 8) that reports 235,700 uses of firearms in defense against violent crime over 2007-2011, or ~47,000 per year. There's no way to know if the defensive attempt succeeded, or if it actually prevented death/injury that wouldn't have been prevented otherwise, but even the low estimates of defensive uses of firearms seem to be non-trivial.

If I had to guess, I'd say the the following:

1. that the number of actual deaths prevented through the intervention of a firearm is smaller (perhaps by a lot) than the number of deaths (homicide, suicide, accident) that occur through the medium of a firearm;
2. that the total number of 'bad' uses is greater than the total number of 'good' uses; and
3. that the number of 'neutral' uses (not crime/accident, not defense) vastly outweighs the other uses put together...