CDC removes pro-gun findings under pressure from Gun Control groups

Stats sourced from a CDC-commissioned study found that instances of defensive gun use occur between 60,000 and 2.5 million times per year.

References to that study were deleted from the site following private meetings with gun control advocates in 2021, emails obtained and published by The Reload show.

“[T]hat 2.5 Million number needs to be killed, buried, dug up, killed again and buried again,” Mark Bryant, executive director of the Gun Violence Archive, wrote to the CDC in one of the emails. “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.””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…”  Yahoo News

Funny, Gary Kleck, the researcher who DID the study, doesn’t seem to agree – in his words:

It’s deja vu all over again. In a recent Politico Magazine article, Evan DeFilippis and Devin Hughes resuscitate criticisms of a survey on defensive gun use that I conducted with my colleague Marc Gertz way back in 1993—the National Self-Defense Survey (NSDS). The authors repeat, item for item, speculative criticisms floated by a man named David Hemenway in 1997 and repeated endlessly since. The conclusion these critics drew is that our survey grossly overestimated the frequency of defensive gun use (DGU), a situation in which a crime victim uses a gun to threaten or attack the offender in self-defense. But what DeFilippis and Hughes carefully withheld from readers is the fact that I and my colleague have refuted every one of Hemenway’s dubious claims, and those by other critics of the NSDS, first in 1997, and again, even more extensively, in 1998 and 2001. Skeptical readers can check for themselves if we failed to refute them—the 1998 version is publicly available here.

DeFilippis and Hughes could refute any of our rebuttals, that would be news worth attending to. … Instead, they just pretend they are not aware of the rebuttals, even though our first systematic dismantling of Hemenway’s speculations was published in the exact same issue of the journal that published Hemenway’s 1997 critique, on the pages immediately following the Hemenway article.

The authors, a couple of Oklahoma investment counselors with no graduate degrees, do not claim to have had any training in survey research methods. Like Hemenway (who is also untrained in survey methods), they believe that it’s perfectly plausible that surveys generate enormous over-estimates of crime-related experiences, as if this were the most commonplace thing in the world. Politico

OK,  I get it. You’re tired of anti-gun-control articles. Heck, I’m tired of getting the opportunity to write these liars. The point is, the CDC is here on record pushing its own research to the side based on political pressure.  Kinda makes you wonder how quickly in the last several years “follow the science” meant “follow the money.”

(I’d love to say “Long Cool Woman in a Black Dress” came to mind when I saw this pic…to be frank, it was a Joe Tex song. You young ‘uns can go look up Joe Tex.)

Category: "Your Tax Dollars At Work", Gun Grabbing Fascists, Guns