The short answer: nowhere you can verify. Firearms instructor Kerry Slone went looking for the data behind the claim and couldn’t find a credible study showing anything close to it. The figure traveled around social media attached to a confident-sounding sentence, but confidence isn’t evidence.
This is the pattern with a lot of gun statistics online. A number gets stated as fact, gets shared, and takes on authority it never earned. When someone tells you that virtually every woman who reaches for a weapon will have it turned on her, the burden is on them to show where that number came from. So far, no one has.
What the Federal Crime Data Actually Shows
The best place to look for this kind of question is the National Crime Victimization Survey, or NCVS. It’s the country’s main source for how often people get hit by crime, paid for by the Bureau of Justice Statistics within the Department of Justice and run by the Census Bureau. The survey doesn’t just count crimes reported to police. Researchers gather accounts straight from those who were victimized, covering incidents whether or not police ever heard about them, plus facts such as the victim’s gender, any weapons that came into play, and whether the person was hurt.
A study in the Journal of Criminal Justice by Lawrence Southwick — “Self-defense with guns: The consequences” — analyzed that NCVS data to see what happened when crime victims tried to defend themselves. Southwick’s core finding on women is that women who resisted an attack without a gun were about four times more likely to be seriously injured than women who resisted with a gun. Slone’s own read of the Southwick data goes a step further: among women who used a firearm defensively, she calculates that 98.75 percent were not injured, for an injury rate of just 1.25 percent.
Put the two claims side by side. One says roughly ninety-nine percent of armed women will have their weapon used against them. The federal data — even before Slone’s more granular gender breakdown — points the opposite direction: women who resist with a firearm are dramatically less likely to be hurt than those who resist without one. These aren’t close. They describe opposite worlds.
Why “Not Injured” Isn’t the Same as “Gun Taken Away”
There’s an important detail buried in that injury figure. The study records whether an injury occurred. It doesn’t say the injured women had their firearms taken away. There’s no claim in it that any of these women were wounded by a round fired from the weapon she was carrying. It doesn’t even say the firearm had anything to do with the injury at all.
That distinction guts the original claim. The “99 percent” statistic is specifically about a weapon being turned against its owner. The real data doesn’t measure that, and the small slice of injuries it does record can’t be assumed to involve a stolen or misused firearm. Someone who wants to argue that armed women routinely get disarmed would need actual evidence of disarmament. That evidence isn’t in this dataset, and it doesn’t seem to be anywhere else.
Where Researchers Disagree About Defensive Gun Use
It’s worth being honest that self-defense gun use is a contested research area, and not every study frames it the way gun owners might prefer. The Harvard Injury Control Research Center, led by David Hemenway, has argued for years that claims of millions of annual defensive gun uses are overestimates driven by the statistical problem of measuring rare events. Hemenway’s own 2013 NCVS-based work with Sara Solnick concluded that using a gun defensively wasn’t associated with a reduced risk of victim injury compared to other protective actions — a finding that lands well short of “the gun will be turned on you,” but also doesn’t support the strongest defensive-gun-use claims.
The Violence Policy Center has pushed a harder line, publishing an FBI-data analysis titled “A Deadly Myth” that concluded handguns don’t offer women protection but instead “guarantee peril.” That study reported that in 1998, women were slain by handguns 101 times over for each single instance in which one of them killed an attacker defensively with a handgun.
Those studies deserve a straight read. Notice what they measure. The VPC analysis counts justifiable killings, not defensive uses that stop an attack without a death. Most defensive gun uses never end in a corpse, so counting only fatal outcomes tells you almost nothing about whether a firearm helped a woman survive. And even Hemenway’s most skeptical finding is that gun use was no worse than other protective actions, not that it guaranteed disarmament. Nothing in this body of research produces anything resembling a ninety-nine percent rate of weapons being used against their owners.
The Tired List of Reasons Women “Shouldn’t” Carry
The “99 percent” line fits a familiar routine. Women hear a standing list of reasons they supposedly can’t rely on a firearm: they lack the strength, they can’t work the slide, they’ll freeze under pressure, the weapon is too confusing to operate, an assailant will simply grab it. The “used against them” claim is one more entry on that list, dressed up with a fake number.
Some of the underlying concerns are legitimate. An attacker can take a firearm from someone. Introducing a gun into a close-quarters physical fight can create additional risk. Those are real considerations. But they’re arguments for training, not for helplessness.
Training Is the Honest Answer, Not “Just Run”
Buying a gun isn’t enough on its own. You have to be able to run your firearm safely, grasp the legal boundaries around when deadly force is warranted, and rehearse getting the gun out from however you happen to carry it. Awareness of your surroundings matters too, and you should recognize that permitting a would-be attacker to shrink the gap between you can sharply narrow what you’re able to do. That’s education, and it’s what actually keeps people alive.
The common advice to “just run away” ignores reality. What if she’s holding her child, or injured, or older, or physically disabled, or trapped inside her own home? What if the attacker is faster and stronger? Sometimes there’s nowhere to run. When strength between the two of you isn’t evenly matched, a firearm gives you a way to close that gap, and that’s precisely why it can serve so well as a defensive tool for a woman who may not be able to fight or flee her way out. Courses like Gunsite’s Ladies Pistol program exist for exactly that reason — take one, take another, and put in reps until the draw stops being a decision and starts being a response.
What to Do With This
No tool guarantees safety. Carrying a gun doesn’t, and neither does running. Women have earned the right to pick the protective means that suit them and then pursue the instruction needed to handle those means capably.
If someone hits you with the “99 percent” line, ask for the source. There isn’t a credible one. Then go the other direction with your own time: find a qualified instructor, learn your firearm cold, understand your state’s laws on deadly force, and put in reps on the draw. Don’t let a made-up statistic decide whether you get to protect yourself.
