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The CDC Killed a Gun Study
by MARK CHESNUT February 24, 2023
Reports that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had been caught red-handed deleting defensive-gun-use statistics from its website at the request of anti-gun “partners” have led to congressional action.
This story was broken by Stephen Gutowski at The Reload. Thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request (FOIA), he received a series of emails showing that three gun-control activists worked closely with CDC officials to remove references to criminologist Gary Kleck’s important 1992 study that showed Americans use firearms for self-defense up to 2.5 million times a year.
Apparently, the 2.5 million figure was the sticking point, as it makes it more difficult for gun-control activists to argue the inaccurate claim that guns are seldom used for self-defense. Mark Bryant, head of the Gun Violence Archive, and two others sought the removal of that figure from the CDC website.
“That 2.5 million number needs to be killed, buried, dug up, killed again and buried again,” Bryant wrote in an email to CDC officials after their in-person meeting. “It is highly misleading, is used out of context and I honestly believe it has zero value—even as an outlier point in honest DGU discussions.”
Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time that the CDC has suppressed numbers on defensive gun usage. As America’s 1st Freedom contributor Dave Kopel reported last year, in the late 1990s, the CDC conducted its own DGU study. The results indicated there are likely more than a million such uses each year; however, the study was never released and was kept secret until, decades later, someone leaked it.
Of course, the actual number of defensive gun uses can only by measured with surveys. The most-recent data from the 2021 National Firearms Survey, conducted under the supervision of Georgetown professor William English, estimated 1.67 million DGUs annually.
The CDC is not the only federal agency that committed such a breach of trust last year. Earlier in 2022, the FBI grossly underreported the number of times armed citizens had stopped mass public shootings.
by MARK CHESNUT February 24, 2023
An Official Journal Of The NRA | The CDC Killed a Gun Study
That a government agency would bury data from a major study on defensive gun use is shocking, but, it is also illustrative. After all, an honest discussion is not what gun controllers seeks.
www.americas1stfreedom.org
Reports that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) had been caught red-handed deleting defensive-gun-use statistics from its website at the request of anti-gun “partners” have led to congressional action.
This story was broken by Stephen Gutowski at The Reload. Thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request (FOIA), he received a series of emails showing that three gun-control activists worked closely with CDC officials to remove references to criminologist Gary Kleck’s important 1992 study that showed Americans use firearms for self-defense up to 2.5 million times a year.
Apparently, the 2.5 million figure was the sticking point, as it makes it more difficult for gun-control activists to argue the inaccurate claim that guns are seldom used for self-defense. Mark Bryant, head of the Gun Violence Archive, and two others sought the removal of that figure from the CDC website.
“That 2.5 million number needs to be killed, buried, dug up, killed again and buried again,” Bryant wrote in an email to CDC officials after their in-person meeting. “It is highly misleading, is used out of context and I honestly believe it has zero value—even as an outlier point in honest DGU discussions.”
Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time that the CDC has suppressed numbers on defensive gun usage. As America’s 1st Freedom contributor Dave Kopel reported last year, in the late 1990s, the CDC conducted its own DGU study. The results indicated there are likely more than a million such uses each year; however, the study was never released and was kept secret until, decades later, someone leaked it.
Of course, the actual number of defensive gun uses can only by measured with surveys. The most-recent data from the 2021 National Firearms Survey, conducted under the supervision of Georgetown professor William English, estimated 1.67 million DGUs annually.
The CDC is not the only federal agency that committed such a breach of trust last year. Earlier in 2022, the FBI grossly underreported the number of times armed citizens had stopped mass public shootings.