The Reload Staff Newsletter - Breaking: Emails Show CDC Removed Defensive Gun Use Stats After Gun-Control Advocates Pressured Officials in Private Meeting

[Charlie T Waite]

We have a report on newly-unearthed emails detailing how gun-control advocates successfully lobbied the CDC to delete references to defensive gun use estimates they don't like. The FOIAd emails reveal the back and forth that led to the change as well as the internal discussions CDC officials were having during the process.

We'll have more reporting on the situation in the coming days. But make sure you read the entire report below first.

Emails Show CDC Removed Defensive Gun Use Stats After Gun-Control Advocates Pressured Officials in Private Meeting
By Stephen Gutowski

The Center For Disease Control (CDC) deleted a reference to a study it commissioned after a group of gun-control advocates complained it made passing new restrictions more difficult.

The lobbying campaign spanned months and culminated with a private meeting between CDC officials and three advocates last summer, a collection of emails obtained by The Reload show. Introductions from the White House and Senator Dick Durbin's (D., Ill.) office helped the advocates reach top officials at the agency after their initial attempt to reach out went unanswered. The advocates focused their complaints on the CDC's description of its review of studies that estimated defensive gun uses (DGU) happen between 60,000 and 2.5 million times per year in the United States--attacking criminologist Gary Kleck's work establishing the top end of the range.

"[T]hat 2.5 Million number needs to be killed, buried, dug up, killed again and buried again," Mark Bryant, one of the attendees, wrote to CDC officials after their meeting. "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."

Bryant, who runs the Gun Violence Archive (GVA), argued Kleck's estimate has been damaging to the political prospects of passing new gun restrictions and should be eliminated from the CDC's website.

"[W]hile 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 and their supporting politicians and is used as a blunt instrument against gun safety regulations every time there is a state or federal level hearing," he wrote in the same email. "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."

Despite initially standing behind the description in the defensive gun use section of its "fast facts" website on gun violence, the CDC backtracked after a previously-undisclosed virtual meeting with the advocates on September 15th, 2021.

Click here to read the full piece.

[Eyesa Horg]

But yet they'll claim it's Constitutional  And of course they don't lie thru they're teeth to get non gun owners to support they're garbage.