If you're asking how many times an armed airline pilot has put a bullet center mass in an armed intruder in the cockpit, under the program, then you already know the answer. None. That is hardly a metric for determining its success.

Quite a number of years ago I was the subject of a carjacking in Scottsdale, Arizona. My then-pregnant wife was out of the car, at a restroom at a service station, late in the evening, when a pickup truck with young men in it pulled up alongside me at an angle, blocking me into my parking spot. I was unable to get out, and two men jumped out of the bed, went around to my passenger door, and opened the door. They were in the car with me, coming across the passenger side, when they caught sight of a small 9mm in my hand. They rapidly left the car, got back in the truck, and left. No shots were fired. No threats made. I didn't say a word, although a couple of them did. What happened, however, was very clear.

They didn't need to enter the car to make their intent clear, however, and had they simply seen the weapon on the seat next to me and left, it would have been a successful use of a weapon in my defense. By the time my wife came out of the restroom and returned to the car, everything was over, and she was none the wiser. It wasn't reported to the police. It wasn't in the papers. It won't ever be part of any statistic, much like the vast majority of weapons uses in defense of citizens all over the country.

I recall the BigHorn County Sheriff saying many years ago, when asked why crime was so low in his county, "Around here, we consider a car jacking to be a suicide."

Bad people think twice about engaging an armed good person. It's one thing to knife and cut down and take down the unarmed. It's entirely another matter to face off with someone who has already drawn down on you, who is trained to shoot you, and fully prepared to do so. Deterrence is as good as firing a shot, if it prevents the fight, is it not? Where will you find statistics on what has been deterred? You won't, any more than you'll find statistics regarding the fire that didn't happen on 6th and Main today, or the 33 car pileup that didn't happen on the southbound Highway 51.

What we do know is that it's a LOT less expensive to put an armed pilot on a flight, than a salaried sky marshall, and the pilot has a BIG advantage over the skymartial in that the pilot is in the cockpit, where the hijacker wants to be. Arming pilots makes a great deal of sense, and asking them to pay for their training, given the huge economic benefit to having volunteers, is asinine.