Oh, for the glory days of the CDC’s anti-liberty/gun “research!” They used to have the unrestrained ability to treat the Second Amendment as a contagion and spent untold millions producing “research” that treated gun ownership as a deadly public health threat. Needless to say, the conclusions of that sort of research were predetermined. But in 1996, Congress rained on that anti-liberty parade:
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The cornerstone of the NRA’s successful effort to hinder gun violence research is the Dickey Amendment, passed in 1996. This amendment, attached to an appropriations bill, mandated that ‘none of the funds made available for injury prevention and control at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) may be used to advocate or promote gun control.’ While the amendment itself did not explicitly ban research, it had a profound chilling effect. The CDC, fearing political backlash and potential funding cuts, interpreted the amendment as a prohibition on any research that could be perceived as advocating for gun control.
That was a good thing. So is this:
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) put defensive gun use figures back on their website, and that data shows upwards of 2.5 million such uses a year.
Graphic: Author
This information from the CDC is not new; rather, it is newly reposted. It was deleted in 2022, and Breitbart News pointed to a FOX News claim that the deletion occurred after the CDC was pressured by gun control activists.
But it is 2026, and the data is back on the CDC website on the “About Firearm Injury and Death” page.
Under the subtitle, “Defensive Gun Use,” the page says, “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.”
As one might expect, anti-liberty/gun cracktivists absolutely hate that figure. They ridicule the very idea that American citizens with guns stop crimes and save lives, almost always without firing a shot.
Dr. John R. Lott of the Crime Prevention Research Center is a scientist gun grabbers love to hate. They routinely attack his conclusions, but can’t damage his methodology or data, which he makes freely available, unlike most anti-gun propagandists. He notes:
“[T]hat 2.5 million number needs to be killed, buried, dug up, killed again and buried again,” Mark Bryant, who runs the Gun Violence Archive (GVA), wrote to CDC officials in September 2021 after meeting with them. Bryant complained that because of the 2.5 million estimate, “gun violence policy has ground to a halt.” But government officials should not censor research or data simply because advocates believe the information makes it harder to advance their preferred policies.
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The Justice Department’s National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) estimates roughly 64,000 to 120,000 defensive firearm uses annually, placing it at the very low end of survey estimates. Researchers have conducted roughly 20 surveys on defensive gun use. Three produced estimates of about 800,000 defensive uses annually with handguns, while most of the others produced estimates exceeding one million, with the highest reaching about 3.5 million. The average estimate is roughly two million. In 2021, Georgetown University’s William English surveyed 16,708 gun owners and estimated approximately 1.67 million defensive gun uses annually.
That’s the kind of honesty and ethical science gun grabbers find so objectionable. In social science, methodology is supremely important. The NCVS survey asks people if they have been crime victims. Only if they answer “yes” are they asked about defensive gun use. People who repel crooks without firing a shot commonly don’t report the incident and don’t think themselves victims, thus explaining low-end results. Even that’s not enough for gun grabbers:
Devin Hughes, who runs the gun-control group GVPedia, argued in a July 6, 2021, email that the CDC should instead rely on the Gun Violence Archive’s defensive-gun-use count. Hughes described GVA as “the most widely accepted compendium of gun violence data.” Yet GVA’s methodology produces dramatically lower defensive-gun-use estimates because it relies heavily on incidents reported by the news media.
As Lott notes, the problem is that “newsworthiness doesn’t provide a representative sample of defensive gun uses.” The media misses defensive gun uses never reported to the police and often refuses to report anything positive about guns and gun owners, such as that 95% of defensive uses don’t fire a shot.
Democrats often accuse President Trump of non-transparency, despite the fact that he’s the most transparent President in memory, constantly engaging with the press. Lott concludes with this:
Whatever estimate one ultimately accepts, the Trump administration at least trusts Americans to evaluate it for themselves.
That’s precisely what gun grabbers don’t want Americans to do.
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Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, lifelong athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer, and high school and college English teacher. He is a published author and blogger. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.
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