The CDC recently 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. Until May 2022, the CDC cited a 2013 National Academies of Sciences report that the agency had co-sponsored. The report reviewed studies that produced widely varying estimates of defensive gun use. It cited an estimate of 108,000 defensive gun uses annually, but warns the “108,000 is difficult to interpret because respondents were not asked specifically about defensive gun use.” The report noted that estimates from national surveys as cited by Kleck ranged from about 500,000 to more than 3 million defensive gun uses per year.
Mark Bryant, the founder of the Gun Violence Archive, was among gun control advocates who complained that gun-rights advocates had cited the estimates so often to “stop [gun-control] legislation.” The CDC has now restored its link to the National Academies report, but it inaccurately says the report puts defensive gun use at only 60,000 to 2.5 million defensive gun uses annually, not what the report itself says as the national survey estimates range from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year, though the 500,000 survey is likely the Peter D. Hart Research Associates survey which indicated there there were about 645,000 defensive gun uses and even that also fails to note that survey involves just handguns. Possibly the National Academies report gets to 500,000 by giving roughly the bottom of the 95% confidence interval from the Hart survey. There is no national survey in the Kleck 2001a paper that the National Academies cites that gives a 500,000 estimate. In fact, the range of estimates that Kleck survey gives ranges from 645,000 for handguns to 3.7 million for all firearms.
The bottom line is the CDC simply put back up what was there before but what they had before was wrong.
What is shown at the CDC
What was in the 2013 National Academies of Sciences report.
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