In August, the Centers for Disease Control restored the numbers for defensive gun uses per year. They'd been removed during the Biden administration, all because anti-gunners found them inconvenient, and the administration played along. Now that POTATUS isn't in charge, those numbers were restored, with a range of 60,000 per year to 2.5 million.
Yeah, folks like The Trace were mad about that.
Now, the numbers have been revised, and the crew over there is even more outraged.
The Trace reported last month that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had added a claim to its web page on firearm injury and death prevention stating that Americans use guns defensively an estimated 60,000 to 2.5 million times each year. On September 28, the CDC updated the defensive gun use estimate again, swapping out the lower number for a much higher one: 500,000.
The CDC did not state why they updated the number. They did not respond to The Trace’s request for comment.
Defensive gun use statistics are highly debated, and previous references to the range on the CDC’s website were removed during the Biden administration at the behest of researchers and gun safety advocates.
The changes reflect the Trump administration’s staunch Second Amendment advocacy, putting the president in lockstep with a gun lobby that’s long promoted the idea that “a good guy with a gun” is the only thing that can stop “a bad guy with a gun.”
The new lower estimate is especially bad for the anti-gun cause, in part because while the CDC isn't taking The Trace's phone calls, we know they didn't just pluck these numbers out of the ether.
And they know where they come from.
The 60,000 figure came from the National Crime Victimization Survey, a twice-yearly poll of crime victims conducted by the federal government. The 500,000 figure, as well as the 2.5 million figure, can be attributed to Florida State University professor Gary Kleck.
Kleck surveyed 5,000 adults by phone in 1993 and asked if they or their household members had used a gun for self-defense in the past five years, even if it wasn’t fired. Just over 1 percent of respondents said they had. Kleck extrapolated that figure to the entire adult population of 200 million, concluding that Americans use guns for self-defense as often as 2.1 million to 2.5 million times a year.
Of course, anti-gunners find a problem with Kleck's research, despite there being little difference between it and some of their favorite bits of "research," other than Kleck didn't cook the books with misleading questions, among other sins.
So, The Trace and other anti-gunners are upset, especially because one of the people spoken to noted that AI chatbots would cite the CDC's numbers. This is true, but let's also be real here: the true problem is that the AI chatbots aren't going to be used to game the system like they've been used in the past.
By trying to throttle the data as they have in the past, anti-gunners want to control the narrative. When the defensive gun use estimates are only published by people like us here at Bearing Arms or researchers who have already been labeled as somehow discredited because they refuse to toe the anti-gun line, they can shape the way the AI chatbots report things. There's a reason almost all of them have an anti-gun bias, and it's because the sources declared authoritative are anti-gun.
Now, one of the most authoritative sources points out that defensive gun uses happen about 10 times more often than a so-called gun death. That makes gun control a much harder sell, and everyone on that side of the fence knows it.
So they're big mad over there, and I can't seem to find it in me to feel the least bit bad about it.
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