According to a recent article, opponents of gun control were successful in convincing the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to remove data on Americans who use the Second Amendment to protect themselves.
According to documents gathered by The Reload, the Biden White House and Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, who paved the path for anti-gun advocates to meet with CDC officials, supported pressure groups in their campaign.
According to emails obtained by The Reload, the main problem was the CDC’s depiction of a study of studies that showed defensive gun use occurs between 60,000 and 2.5 million times annually in the United States.
After complaints from a trio of gun-control advocates, the CDC quietly altered its website to remove a range of estimates on how often guns are used in self-defense. https://t.co/tKmo3v3BNg
— Stephen Gutowski (@StephenGutowski) December 15, 2022
Anti-gun advocate Mark Bryant focused on the high end of the range in his communications with the CDC.
“[T]hat 2.5 Million number needs to be killed, buried, dug up, killed again and buried again,” he wrote according to an email obtained by The Reload.
“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.”
The Gun Violence Archive’s Bryant argued that after that study was completed, it would be easier to implement gun control legislation.
“And while that very small study by Gary Kleck has been debunked repeatedly by everyone from all sides of this issue [even Kleck] it still remains canon by gun rights folks and their supporting politicians and is used as a blunt instrument against gun safety regulations every time there is a state or federal level hearing,” he wrote.
“Put simply, in the time that 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,” he wrote.
Beth Reimels, Associate Director for Policy, Partnerships, and Strategic Communication at the CDC’s Division of Violence Prevention, predicted that the advocates will soon be content about three months later.
“We are planning to update the fact sheet in early 2022 after the release of some new data. We will also make some edits to the content we discussed that I think will address the concerns you and other partners have raised,” she wrote.
The change did not come without some resistance.
“We stand behind our fact sheet, which essentially points out that estimates of defensive gun use vary depending on the data source, questions asked, populations studied, timeframes, and other factors related to the design of studies,” Linda Dahlberg, a senior advisor to the director of the Divison of Violence Prevention wrote in August 2021.
The current CDC text on defensive gun uses omits any statistics on how common they are.
Official CDC position on defensive gun use: https://t.co/XyvnwTEldU pic.twitter.com/EwULP8ahGt
— Defensive Gun Use 🟧 (@DefensiveGun) June 26, 2022
“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,” Kleck said.
Kleck, who is a Professor Emeritus at Florida State University’s College of Criminology and Criminal Justice, said the CDC never contacted him and said it was engaged in “blatant censorship.”