Victim-disarming gun controllers like to claim that Congress banned gun research by the CDC back in 1996.
Those of us living in this universe know that’s a lie. Research was never banned. What was banned was anti-gun activism, using governmen t funds to promote unconstitutional gun people control. The funds they lost were the reasearch funds the CDC diverted from research to gun control promotion. Immorally and possibly illegally.
Government-funded “gun violence” research marched on. The NIH, just for one example, rather routinely funds gun research to the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars per year; some years a lot more.
But about CDC research that the anti-rights crowd would have you believe ended 22 years ago…
What Do CDC’s Surveys Say About the Frequency of Defensive Gun Uses?
In 1996, 1997, and 1998, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) conducted large-scale national surveys asking about defensive gun use (DGU). They never released the findings, or even acknowledged they had studied the topic. I obtained the unpublished raw data and computed the prevalence of DGU. CDC’s findings indicated that an average of 2.46 million U.S. adults used a gun for self-defense in each of the years from 1996 through 1998 – almost exactly confirming the estimate for 1992 of Kleck and Gertz (1995). Possible reasons for CDC’s suppression of these findings are discussed.
Just in case any of my readers are public school victims, 1997 and 1998 are after 1996. And in the paper you’ll find cites for year 2000 gun research funded by the CDC.
The CDC didn’t end research. They just ended publication when the results didn’t fit the “guns are bad and no one uses them defensively so ban ’em” narrative.
Even better, their research validated Kleck’s earlier work on defensive gun use numbers. That was really inconvenient.
“2.46 million U.S. adults used a gun for self-defense in each of the years from 1996 through 1998.”
The CDC knew. And suppressed the data.
Random Acts of Gibberish 