CDC Fires a Shot — Hits Gun-grabbers’ Agenda Right Between the Eyes

It may be the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), but what it isn’t, at least not anymore, is the Centers for Gun Control. While the CDC did once fund anti-Second Amendment “research,” a 1996 law put an end to such advocacy. In later years the worm fully turned, with the agency actually telling the truth about American firearm use. And what truth is it telling currently?

It’s that, contrary to legacy-media myth, defensive firearm use is much more common than many suppose.

In fact, good Americans use guns for legitimate defensive purposes up to 2.5 million times per year.

Moreover, coming on the heels of this is a Georgetown professor’s survey on the subject. After gun-control advocates questioned its methods, the academic performed the research again and revised his findings.

That is, he revised them upwards — bringing his defensive-gun-use number more in line with the CDC’s.

In an odd coincidence, just last night I happened to re-watch a relevant All in the Family episode. In it, the famed Archie Bunker character bought a handgun for home defense. It ended up, however, being used against him and his family by home invaders. The message, the handiwork of liberal creator Norman Lear, was clear and common:

Don’t get a gun. It’s more likely it’ll be used against you than it is that you’ll be able to use it against criminals.

Yet the message is also deceitful. Never revealed is that the claimants are including suicides in their calculation. And at least 75 percent of firearm deaths in gun-owning homes are suicides.

Moreover, these claimants don’t factor in defensive firearm use wherein guns are merely displayed, but not fired, to deter threats. This is for good reason: Such activity constitutes at least 75-80 percent of defensive gun uses (DGU).

This brings us to the gun-grabber-refuting CDC story. As Breitbart reported August 24, the CDC

put defensive gun use figures back on their website, and that data shows upwards of 2.5 million such uses a year.

This information from the CDC is not new; rather, it is newly reposted. It was deleted in 2022, and Breitbart News pointed to a FOX News claim that the deletion occurred after the CDC was pressured by gun control activists.

But it is 2026, and the data is back on the CDC website on the “About Firearm Injury and Death” page.

Under the subtitle, “Defensive Gun Use,” the page says, “Estimates of defensive gun use vary depending on the questions asked, populations studied, timeframe, and other factors related to study design. The report Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence indicates a range of 60,000 to 2.5 million defensive gun uses each year.”

That’s quite a disparity, of course. But how many lives did this save? We don’t know for sure. What’s certain is that even the lower number is far more than 2025’s 14,085 homicides, almost 28 percent of which were not committed with firearms.

It’s interesting, too, noting where the CDC’s (2.1 to) 2.5-million-DGU number originated: with Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck. Why interesting? Because by his own admission, Kleck was a lifelong Democrat who belonged to multiple left-wing organizations, including the ACLU. Furthermore, he believed the gun-control narrative. His hypothesis upon mounting his research was wholly contrary to the DGU reality revealed.

And his study also revealed something else. Of those 2.1-2.5 million Americans using guns defensively, 400,000 of them say they would’ve been killed if they hadn’t been armed. That’s 400,000 a year.

Affirmation

Again, though, we don’t know how many of them would’ve actually been killed. We do know that gun-grabbing leftists want to kill such findings. They question Kleck’s data — just as they questioned that of the aforementioned Georgetown professor. And, boy, they now perhaps wish they hadn’t doubted the latter.

The story, per Fox News on Friday:

In 2021, Professor William English published the findings of his National Firearms Survey, by far the most comprehensive assessment of gun ownership ever conducted. The data demonstrated that defensive gun uses were commonplace, that ordinary Americans really like the weapons gun control activists hate most and that longstanding stereotypes about the “sort” of Americans who exercise their Second Amendment rights were misplaced.

Gun-control advocates didn’t appreciate this one bit. They questioned English’s results, registering picayune complaints. The professor insisted that the supposed problems didn’t significantly alter the results. This fell on deaf ears, however, so he re-administered the survey, remedying the alleged issues. His new findings?

They were another, even more powerful blow to the gun-grabber agenda than was the 2021 survey. Here’s a summary of three significant points:

• Anti-gunners claim that so-called assault rifles and large-capacity magazines are “weapons of war” and not in common use. The reality: Approximately 26.4 million Americans currently own an AR-15 or a similarly styled pistol-grip semi-auto. (This is up from 24.6 million who’d ever owned one in 2021.) About 44.5 million currently own a magazine over 10 rounds (50.5 percent of gun owners). This figure was around 39 million in 2021.
• Seventy percent of gun owners say there are at least some circumstances in which they carry a handgun for defense. The 2021 figure was 56 percent.
• Diversity: A larger share of owners comes from groups that historically owned guns less. Female ownership rose 3.5 points even after the survey told people to count only firearms they personally own, not a spouse’s. This undercuts the “women were counting his guns” critique of 2021.

The Coup de Grâce

Most significantly, though, English’s new DGU figure closely aligns with that of the CDC and Kleck. As Fox also relates:

English’s original survey estimated that American adults use firearms to defend themselves, their property or others 1.67 million times annually, excluding military, police and security work.

Critics called that estimate “implausible,” arguing that the broad definition — which included incidents where a gun was mentioned but not displayed — and allegedly “leading” questions meant many reported uses may have been “imagined.”

Ironically, critics were right that the numbers were off, but wrong about the direction: the 2021 survey may have actually undercounted defensive gun uses.

The new dataset yielded an annual average of 2.2 million defensive gun uses. Part of the increase likely came from asking about protection against animal attacks, which accounted for over 8% of reported uses.

So relevant here is a twist on a famous line by French economist Frédéric Bastiat. That is, a bad social analyst considers only what is obvious. A good social analyst considers what is obvious — and what is obscure.

Murders committed with guns, such as mass shootings, are obvious. They grab headlines; you can’t miss them. Yet all the murders not committed because the would-be victims had guns are not so obvious. But those Americans are real people.

If the gun grabbers had their way, however, these innocents would no longer be. They’d be dead.