The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been caught red-handed deleting defensive-gun-use statistics from its website.
In a story broken by Stephen Gutowski at The Reload, a collection of emails accessed through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request showed that gun-control activists worked closely, both face to face and via email, with CDC officials to remove statistics they didn’t like from the CDC’s website. Specifically, they didn’t want people to know about criminologist Gary Kleck’s 1992 study that indicated that Americans use firearms for self-defense up to 2.5 million times a year.
Apparently, the 2.5 million figure was making it more difficult for gun-control advocates to argue that guns are seldom used for self-defense. That prompted Mark Bryant, head of the Gun Violence Archive, and two other gun-ban activists to work with the CDC to seek removal of that figure.
“That 2.5 million number needs to be killed, buried, dug up, killed again and buried again,” Bryant wrote to CDC officials after their 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.”
For his part, Kleck, professor emeritus at Florida State University’s College of Criminology and Criminal Justice, said the CDC did not contact him before removing the figure.
“CDC is just aligning itself with the gun-control advocacy groups,” Kleck told The Reload. “It’s just saying, ‘We are their tool, and we will do their bidding.’ And that’s not what a government agency should do.”
This again proves that the federal government under the Biden administration is working with anti-gun advocates to sway the critical discussion on defensive gun uses toward the anti-Second Amendment point of view. Interestingly, this is not the first time this year that a federal agency has committed such a breach of conduct.
Earlier this year, the FBI grossly underreported the number of times armed citizens had stopped mass murderers over an eight-year period. John Lott, head of the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), brought that fact to the attention of Congress when he testified before the U.S. House Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security.
“The FBI reports that armed citizens stopped only 11 of the 252 active shooter incidents that it identified for the period 2014-2021,” Lott told the members of Congress in attendance. “To compile its list, the FBI hired academics at the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State University. Police departments don’t collect data, so the researchers had to find news stories about these incidents.
“The CPRC also undertook a search for news stories,” Lott said. “We discovered a total of 360 active shooter incidents from 2014 to 2021, and found that an armed citizen stopped 124 of these.”
An open and honest discussion, with the best data available there for all to see, is what fosters healthy and productive policy debates. These attempts to control the narrative by eliminating data gun-control groups find inconvenient to their agendas should not be happening in a free country.
