16 Dec In-the-News Update [Issue: 2nd Amendment]
It’s no secret that in this day and age of polarization, political elitism, and Orwellian authoritarianism that government agencies like the FBI, IRS, NSA and more are politicized and used to enact the agenda for the whomever is the current holder of the White House and divisions of Congress. It goes without saying that the CDC is among them, especially throughout the duration of and even post-pandemic time. Despite the agency supposedly being focused on public health and disease research, the CDC does track statistics and studies on gun violence, as it has been deemed a “public health crisis” by many a Leftist. However, emails that were recently acquired through FOIA requests by The Reload have found that the CDC went so far as to amend and remove specific statistics on the rate at which Americans lawfully defend themselves with firearms each year at the behest of a handful of anti-gun activist organizations. Advocates from the Gun Violence Archive and GVPedia, both of which are frequent lobbyists for gun control, contacted officials at the CDC through Sen. Dick Durbin’s (D – IL) office to complain that a statistical figure from an academic study was “misleading” and made it more difficult to pass gun control legislation. The statistic in question comes from a study conducted by Gary Kleck at Florida State University, in which his results estimate that defensive gun uses (DGUs) occur between 60,000 and 2.5 million times per year; a figure that certainly spells trouble for much of the anti-gun narrative. Following a chain of email communications, the CDC eventually removed the higher-end “2.5 million” statistic from their website, succumbing to the whims of the anti-gun activists knocking at their door.