CDC Deletes Defensive Gun Use Data after Pressure from Gun Control Activists
What do gun control activists do when statistics aren’t in their favor? Delete it, of course!
Gun control activists’ biggest enemy is defensive gun use (DGU) statistics. These statistics make selling gun control even harder because they prove that guns save lives. Recently, gun control activists persuaded the CDC to remove the higher-end DGU statistics from their website.
According to Fox News:
“The stats sourced from a CDC-commissioned study finding that instances of defensive gun use occur between 60,000 and 2.5 million times per year. References to that study were deleted from the site following private meetings with gun control advocates in 2021, emails obtained and published by The Reload show.“
Fox News
In one email the CDC calls the activists “partners.” In another, Beth Reimels, the Director for Policy, Partnerships, and Strategic Communication in the CDC’s Division of Violence Prevention, said, “We will also make some edits to the content we discussed that I think will address the concerns you and other partners have raised.” The CDC also made no efforts to reach out to the researcher whose higher-end DGU estimates were taken down from their website.
Statistics showing that defensive gun use is a common occurrence have been available for years. A study by the CDC in 2013 said the following about defensive gun use:
Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million, in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008.
CDC, 2013
The biggest counter-argument for gun control activists is statistics, especially how many people are SAVED every year by a firearm. The old saying “a good guy with a gun stops a bad guy with a gun” continues to be true. By trying to suppress the states that prove personal gun use saves lives, the CDC is purposefully misleading the public.