Following complaints from gun control advocates that defensive firearms use stats would make gun control policies more difficult to pass, the CDC removed the data from its website. The removed data suggested defensive gun use occurs between 60,000 to 2.5 million times per year in the United States. Gun Violence Archive head Mark Bryant told the CDC, “[T]hat 2.5 million number needs to be killed, buried, dug up, killed again and buried again.” Bryant added, “Put simply, in the time that study has been published as ‘a CDC Study’ gun violence prevention policy has ground to a halt, in no small part because of the misinformation that small study provided.”
From Newsmax:
The CDC initially stood behind the description in the defensive gun use section of its "fast fact" website on gun violence, but backtracked after a previously undisclosed virtual meeting with the advocates on Sept. 15, 2021, according to The Reload. "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 email to the three advocates on Dec. 10. "We will also make some edits to the content we discussed that I think will address the concerns you and other partners have raised."
