Dr. John Lott has a new op-ed at Townhall.
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The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has restored information on defensive gun use that it removed from its website in 2022 after gun-control advocates privately pressured agency officials to take it down. For years, until May 2022, the CDC cited a 2013 National Academies of Sciences report reviewing studies that produced estimates ranging from roughly 64,000 to 3.5 million defensive gun uses annually, while the CDC itself cited an upper estimate of 2.5 million. The agency subsequently removed both the estimates and the link to the National Academies report, but it has now restored the discussion of defensive gun use and the link to the report.
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The restoration adds another victory for supporters of armed self-defense during the Trump administration. The administration has challenged restrictive concealed-carry laws, ended the Biden administration’s “zero tolerance” policy that threatened gun dealers’ licenses over relatively minor paperwork violations, appointed judges viewed favorably by gun-rights advocates, and pursued other changes..
Soon after Biden became president, introductions facilitated by the White House and Illinois Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin’s office helped gun-control advocates connect with senior CDC officials. The advocates subsequently held a private meeting with CDC officials and exchanged numerous emails as they pressed the agency to remove the defensive gun-use estimates.
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“[T]hat 2.5 million number needs to be killed, buried, dug up, killed again and buried again,” Mark Bryant, who runs the Gun Violence Archive (GVA), wrote to CDC officials in September 2021 after meeting with them. Bryant complained that because of the 2.5 million estimate, “gun violence policy has ground to a halt.” But government officials should not censor research or data simply because advocates believe the information makes it harder to advance their preferred policies.
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The Justice Department’s National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) estimates roughly 64,000 to 120,000 defensive firearm uses annually, placing it at the very low end of survey estimates. Researchers have conducted roughly 20 surveys on defensive gun use. Three produced estimates of about 800,000 defensive uses annually with handguns, while most of the others produced estimates exceeding one million, with the highest reaching about 3.5 million. The average estimate is roughly two million. In 2021, Georgetown University’s William English surveyed 16,708 gun owners and estimated approximately 1.67 million defensive gun uses annually.
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The NCVS methodology explains its comparatively low estimate. The survey first asks respondents whether they have been victims of a crime. Only those who answer yes receive follow-up questions about whether they used a firearm defensively. But people who successfully brandish a firearm and scare away a would-be attacker may not consider themselves crime victims in the first place.
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Devin Hughes, who runs the gun-control group GVPedia, argued in a July 6, 2021, email that the CDC should instead rely on the Gun Violence Archive’s defensive-gun-use count. Hughes described GVA as “the most widely accepted compendium of gun violence data.” Yet GVA’s methodology produces dramatically lower defensive-gun-use estimates because it relies heavily on incidents reported by the news media.
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In 2021, RealClearInvestigations examined GVA’s defensive-gun-use data from January 1 through August 10 and identified 774 cases. Initial news reports supplied 95 percent of those cases. I compared GVA’s cases with lists compiled by the Heritage Foundation and the Crime Prevention Research Center and found another 30 cases that GVA had missed. But those omissions weren’t the fundamental problem.
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The larger problem is that newsworthiness doesn’t provide a representative sample of defensive gun uses. In GVA’s data, 43 percent of cases involved fatalities, 42 percent involved woundings, and 10 percent involved defensive shots that hit no one. Fewer than 4 percent involved no shots being fired, and more than half of those involved citizens holding criminals at gunpoint until police arrived. Yet research on defensive gun use indicates that incidents involving shots fired represent only a small fraction of defensive firearm uses.
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Relying on news coverage creates two obvious selection problems. First, the news media cannot report incidents that never come to the attention of police or journalists. Criminologists have long known that many violent crimes never get reported to police, and the news media cover only a fraction of those that do. Second, research indicates that roughly 95 percent of defensive gun uses involve brandishing rather than firing the weapon. Those incidents are precisely the ones least likely to generate police reports or news stories.
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Bryant rejects the argument that media coverage disproportionately captures the most violent cases. “I don’t think it is a newsworthy issue … too many media really like the feel-good stories of homeowner standing up to home invader,” Bryant wrote to me. “Even better if it was a granny doing it. They don’t just go with the ‘if it bleeds …’ newsworthiness.”
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But consider the choice facing an editor: one incident leaves a body on the ground; in another, nobody gets hurt because the intended victim displays a firearm and the would-be attacker runs away. In the second case, reporters may not even know what crime the person intended to commit. Which incident is more likely to become a news story?
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Even that comparison understates the problem. When a law-abiding citizen scares away a would-be criminal simply by displaying a firearm, journalists often never get the opportunity to decide whether the incident deserves coverage. Neither the citizen nor the criminal may report it to police, and neither may contact the press.
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That is precisely why researchers conduct representative surveys rather than trying to estimate defensive gun use from news stories. The CDC once acknowledged the range produced by that research. After sustained lobbying from gun-control advocates, it removed those estimates from its website. Restoring the underlying research would allow readers to evaluate the evidence for themselves rather than presenting only the information favored by one side of the gun-policy debate.
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The CDC’s decision to restore the National Academies report gives Americans access once again to research showing that defensive gun use may occur far more frequently than media-based counts suggest. The episode also shows the danger of allowing advocacy groups to pressure a government agency into removing legitimate research simply because they believe opponents use it to defeat their preferred legislation.
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Whatever estimate one ultimately accepts, the Trump administration at least trusts Americans to evaluate it for themselves.
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