NRA members have long known that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has been on a multi-decade mission to paint gun ownership as a “disease” that needs to be eradicated from American life.
I remember back in the ‘90s when Mark Rosenberg, director of the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention, was quoted in The Washington Post: “We need to revolutionize the way we look at guns, like what we did with cigarettes. It used to be that smoking was a glamour symbol—cool, sexy, macho. Now it is dirty, deadly—and banned.”
We know the CDC is little more than a propaganda mouthpiece working hand-in-hand with anti-gun activists.
The CDC recently deleted a reference to a study it had commissioned that showed Americans used firearms up to 2.5 million times a year to defend themselves and their loved ones from criminal attacks.
Why? Because anti-gun activists told them to, according to email correspondence that has now been made public.
“[T]hat 2.5 million number needs to be killed, buried, dug up, killed again and buried again,” anti-gun zealot Mark Bryant of the so-called Gun Violence Archive wrote to the CDC. Bryant went on to complain how this inconvenient truth was used by pro-Second Amendment advocates and elected officials to fight back against unconstitutional restrictions on gun ownership.
This unseemly (at best) partnership between a federal agency that is supposed to conduct unbiased research into public-health issues and anti-gun activists evidently started in late 2021, when President Joe Biden’s White House and Illinois Senator Dick Durbin’s office put the two in touch.
“We are planning to update the fact sheet in early 2022 after the release of some new data,” Beth Reimels, associate director for Policy, Partnerships and Strategic Communication at the CDC’s Division of Violence Prevention, said in an email to the activists. “We will also make some edits to the content we discussed that I think will address the concerns you and other partners have raised.”
Gary Kleck, professor emeritus at Florida State University’s College of Criminology and Criminal Justice and author of the defensive firearm-use study, told multiple outlets, “CDC is just aligning 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.”
All of this on its face shows us that the CDC—which is supposed to be a clearinghouse for factual, scientific research—is anything but that. Furthermore, it lays bare what we NRA members have always known: The arguments in favor of gun bans and gun control are so flawed and fragile they can’t withstand the light of truth.
And that truth is simple: Firearms in the hands of law-abiding Americans save millions of lives every year. They prevent countless rapes, armed robberies, muggings and murders. That is a fact. And no matter how much the CDC, gun-ban politicians, the media and all of their enablers try to censor that fact, the National Rifle Association will continue to get the truth out far and wide.
That’s why every month, and for decades now, NRA publishes the real-life stories of armed citizens in the pages of this magazine. These stories rarely make it beyond the back pages of local town papers. We publish them on our social-media pages and on our website, and we inject them into the national conversation despite the continuing efforts of the gun-control lobby to cover them up.
Armed citizens like Shay Lindberg, who used her lawfully carried firearm to stop a criminal monster from abducting her child earlier this year. According to the police sergeant on the scene: “It certainly looks like the big turning point here, the pivotal piece to keeping her child safe, was the fact that she was lawfully armed with a handgun, and she produced it and told them ‘let go of my kid.’”
Stories like the one from Gilmer County, Ga., just a couple of months ago—when an armed thug tried to rob a convenience store, but was thwarted by not one, not two, but three lawfully armed customers on the scene. These brave armed citizens stopped a potentially deadly crime, and helped the police take another menace to society off the streets.
As NRA members, you and I are constantly facing off against anti-gun forces that have more money, more power and more media organs at their disposal. But never forget that we have the most powerful weapon of all: Truth. And, as long there is a strong National Rifle Association of America, the truth will never die.
