During the Biden administration, gun control activists were able to get the Centers for Disease Control to remove any mention of defensive gun uses from its website. Previously, the agency had language indicating anywhere between 60,000 and 2.5 million DGUs annually; in most cases, instances where the trigger wasn’t pulled but the presence of the firearm was enough to prevent a situation from escalating into violence.
Well, now those figures are back, and anti-gun activists are not happy about it. The Everytown-affiliated website The Trace spoke to anti-gun advocates Mark Bryant, who runs the Gun Violence Archive (where a gang-related shooting that happens on a school playground at midnight is counted as a “school shooting”, and Devin Hughes, who runs GVPedia, a site that seems to be dedicated to persuading people not to exercise their Second Amendment rights.
Bryant told The Trace that the CDC’s decision to restore the numbers was a “shame.” He dismissed the figures as “nothing more than gross estimates based on limited surveys.” Hughes, meanwhile, called the agency’s move “disappointing but unsurprising,” adding, “It is the politically motivated laundering of disinformation that has become a hallmark of the Trump administration’s approach to all scientific inquiry, and gun violence is no exception.”
Speaking of disinformation, if you go to Hughes’s website you’ll find a “comprehensive fact sheet that details important considerations for gun ownership.” Those “facts” include the claims that more guns leads to more deaths and more assaults, and that defensive gun uses are “rare compared to gun harm.”
The “more guns, more crime” hypothesis has been debunked by reality. Homicides are at their lowest levels in at least 70 years, violent crime overall is trending downward, and there are about a million guns sold each and every month. The claim that defensive gun uses are rare compared to “gun harm” is also nonsense.
Even on the low end of estimates, 65,000 DGUs per year is more than all gun-involved homicides and suicides combined. There are an estimated 80,000 non-fatal injuries involving firearms each year (a figure that includes accidental/negligent discharges as well as criminal assaults). At best, anti-gunners like Hughes can say that the rate of “gun harm” is about the double the rate of defensive gun uses every year, but that’s dependent on solely using the National Crime Victimization Survey.
Almost every other study that’s looked at defensive gun uses found them to be much more common than the NCVS results. The 2021 National Firearms Survey, for instance, estimated 1.67 million DGUs every year. That’s more than ten times the amount of gun-involved deaths and injuries in the United States.
The CDC doesn’t point to any particular study as the gold standard for measuring defensive gun uses. It acknowledges the wide variation in estimates and links to a 2013 report by the National Academies for Science, Engineering, and Medicine entitled “Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence.”
That’s not good enough for the anti-gunners, though. They don’t want any mention of firearms being used to save lives because it undercuts their argument against gun ownership.
Well, too bad. That estimate of DGUs and the link to the National Academies paper is almost certainly going to remain in place until the next time the gun control lobby has a stalwart ally in the White House, at which point DGU denialism will once again be deemed a scientifically sound point of view and the public will be shielded (at least when visiting the CDC website) from any knowledge about the large numbers of Americans who protect themselves and others while exercising their Second Amendment rights.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their extreme gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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