Reliable studies show defensive gun use in 100k-1 million incidents per year in the US.
https://fee.org/articles/defensive-gun-use-is-more-than-shoo...
That's not "exception to the rule".
These are not hard stats, they’re self reports from people who had occasions where they felt safer carrying. Peak confirmation bias. Of course we can find 100k people whose guns made them feel safer once.
But that’s not the question we are trying to answer. We want to know if you are actually protected by owning a firearm. The evidence suggests it has quite the opposite effect.
Your quote is referring to the study where - "used a gun for defense during a situation in which they thought someone “almost certainly would have been killed""
In context the sentence you have quoted simply means the researchers could not be certain that the participants would have died if not for the gun defence.
It is in no way suggesting that they were not legitimate uses of self defence with a firearm.