The following includes editorial content written by a retired Police Chief and current staff writer for Law Enforcement Today.
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WASHINGTON, DC- Let’s face facts, shall we? It has become painfully clear that the American people can no longer trust a word that comes out of “official” Washington, DC.
From the FBI to the CIA, the White House to the CDC, it’s clear that whatever sewage emanates from the swamp must be taken with a giant grain of salt mixed with an even bigger dose of suspicion and skepticism.
The latest example comes to us courtesy of the Daily Caller News Foundation (DCNF), which reported last month that the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), which we found during the COVID situation has as much credibility as the National Enquirer, “cooked the books” so to speak when it comes to defensive use of firearms.
NEW: Emails Show CDC Removed Defensive Gun Use Stats After Gun-Control Advocates Pressured Officials in Private Meeting https://t.co/tKmo3v3BNg
— Stephen Gutowski (@StephenGutowski) December 15, 2022
Reports say that the CDC kowtowed to a number of gun control advocates, who complained that certain statistics published by the agency, made their efforts to violate the Second Amendment rights of lawful American gun owners more difficult. That information was revealed through a series of emails exchanged between CDC officials and gun control activist.
During a three-month period, gun control zealots met with agency officials regarding their published accounting of defensive gun uses per year, which ranged from between 60,000 to 2.5 million which was pursuant to a number of different studies, the emails revealed.
Where the 2.5 million statistic is concerned, gathered from a study by criminologist Gary Kleck, professor emeritus at Florida State University, the gun control nuts argued that number was misleading, incorrect, and (egad!) made it much harder to pass gun control laws. Those “concerns” prompted the CDC to remove such statistics from their website.
“[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 in an email to the agency. “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 [defensive gun use] discussions.”
In other words, it didn’t fit the narrative that guns are used only in the commission of crimes and have no place as far as being a viable defensive weapon.
According to The Reload, the CDC, at least initially, stood behind the study in the “defensive gun use” portion of its “fast facts” website. However, the statistics were removed after the meeting with gun control advocates on Sept 15, a meeting which had previously not been disclosed.
“We are planning to update the fact sheet in early 2022 after the release of some new data,” Beth Reimels, Associate Director for Policy, Partnerships, and Strategic Communication at the CDC’s Division of Violence Prevention, said in one particular email.
In place of the range of estimates forcibly removed by gun control nuts, the CDC’s website now says:
“Estimates of defensive gun use vary depending on the questions asked, populations studied, timeframe and other factors related to study design. Given the wide variability in estimates, additional research is necessary to understand defensive gun use, prevalence, frequency, circumstances, and outcomes.”
Meanwhile for his part, Kleck stands by his research, telling The Reload that the CDC didn’t bother to reach out to him to get additional perspective on the statistic prior to their pulling it from the website, which he argued amounted to “blatant censorship.”
“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 told the outlet.
In trying to throw cover for their decision to censor the statistic, the CDC offered a lame explanation, claiming the range of defensive uses of firearms was a “very wide range” and could “raise more questions than it answered,” The Reload said.
“Because estimates of defensive gun use vary depending on the questions asked, populations studied, timeframe, and other factors related to study design, and given the wide variability in previous estimates and the desire to keep the fact sheet short and succinct, it made the most sense to remove the numbers from the fact sheet and acknowledge that additional research is necessary to understand the defensive gun use prevalence, frequency, circumstances and outcomes,” the CDC equivocated.
Kleck however isn’t buying that explanation.
“…that it’s just another way of saying we can’t afford to even put one sentence in about the most frequent violence-related use of firearms,” he told The Reload. “You can’t understand any significant aspects of the gun control debate once you eliminate defensive gun use.”
Continuing, Kleck said, “It’s not complicated.”
Incidentally, Bryant was one of a number of gun control loons who met with CDC officials, an arrangement that was facilitated by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) Fox News reported.
Fox noted that at least initially, the CDC resisted efforts to remove Kleck’s references. For example, Dr. Deb Houry, the CDC’s acting principal deputy director, argued that Bryant’s group looked at only “a very small subset of people who have used guns defensively,” while adding that it “does not include individuals who might have used guns defensively, but not reported this use to law enforcement.”
Houry continued that in a case where a person pulled a firearm to prevent a conflict, it would not necessarily register under the metrics used by Bryant unless that individual reported it to the police.
Nobody from the CDC, Bryant’s group, or Professor Kleck responded to requests for comment from either the DCNF or Fox News Digital.
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