The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in Atlanta apparently bowed to pressure from anti-Second Amendment radicals in 2022 when the agency deleted revealing statistics chronicling defensive gun uses in the U.S.
A study by Florida State emeritus professor Gary Kleck showed that Americans use their right to keep and bear arms to defend themselves as many as 2.5 million times per year.
That was too much for the gun control lobby, which successfully strong-armed CDC into erasing the information four years ago.
CDC once again acknowledges findings of defensive gun use research
Well, it’s back.
Breitbart News reported that the study’s results are again available under the “defensive gun use” subtitle on the agency’s website.
The CDC noted: “Estimates of defensive gun use vary depending on the questions asked, populations studied, timeframe, and other factors related to study design. The report Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence indicates a range of 60,000 to 2.5 million defensive gun uses each year.”
Government agencies should not fold under political pressure
Anti-2A outfit The Trace blasted the CDC’s notation of defensive gun uses as bending the knee to the current administration’s move toward restoring gun rights.
The group claimed that the White House is “in lockstep with a gun lobby that’s long promoted the idea that a ‘good guy with a gun’ is the only thing that can stop a ‘bad guy with a gun.’
That’s simply false. There are many instances in which a person under attack successfully fled the suspect or was somehow able to avoid injury in a deadly confrontation.
But these are the outliers.
In the real world that The Trace and its collaborators seek to ignore conveniently, there are life-or-death instances every day where the legal possession of a firearm prevents a law-abiding citizen from being added to the victim rolls.
Not every such encounter leads to gunfire, as even critics must admit. There are numerous instances where wielding a weapon stops violent criminals in their tracks, and without shots fired, these go largely unnoticed by law enforcement, as they are not always reported.
The CDC reposting is not new, but it is telling in how a supposedly nonpartisan government agency rolls over for anti-gunners.
Kleck told The Reload that the CDC blatantly “aligned itself with the gun control advocacy groups. It’s just saying, ‘We are their tool, and we will do their bidding.’ And that’s not what a government agency should do.”
How did this happen?
The Gun Violence Archive is notorious for ridiculously claiming there are multiple “mass shootings” every single day. Federal law enforcement agencies diametrically oppose this obviously inaccurate position, but that does not matter.
The group’s executive director, Mark Bryant, met virtually with the CDC along with several other activists in a setting reportedly facilitated through Sen. Dick Durbin’s (D-IL) office.
Bryant dismissed Kleck’s research as a “very small study” that, of course, had already been debunked by himself and others of his gun control ilk. “Put simply, in the time that the study has been published as ‘a CDC study,’ gun violence prevention policy has ground to a halt, in no small part because of the misinformation that small study provided.”
To its credit, the CDC initially resisted the partisan political pressure to erase research findings from its website, but that soon changed.
CDC Associate Director for Policy, Partnerships, and Strategic Communication Beth Reimels announced that the agency would “update the fact sheet in early 2022 after the release of some new data.”
In practice, that meant deleting the groundbreaking study entirely. Now it’s back, but the lesson learned is one that Second Amendment defenders should take to heart.
Of all federal agencies, CDC should be near the top of those that do not bow to special interest groups. That, for now, has been corrected.
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