The left loves an open debate - when they can make sure only their side is heard.
Otherwise, they scamper away like cockroaches when the Irish clog-dancing team turns on the light and walks...er, clomps into the room.
During the Biden administration, the Centers for Disease Control abolished the display of statistics related to "Defensive Gun Uses" - cases of law-abiding citizens using firearms to deter or stop crimes and criminals - which overwhelmingly involve no shots fired, and one or more criminals scampering away like...well, let's just re-use the cockroach metaphor above.
So Trump's CDC is putting that information out again. And Michael Bloomberg's minions in big Gun Control are big mad:
The Trace, the propaganda arm of former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s gun control empire, moved a story Monday that has caused some laughter. Actually, quite a lot of laughter.
“Inflated Claim About Guns and Self-Defense Returns to CDC Website” claims that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, better known as the CDC, estimates “a range of 60,000 to 2.5 million defensive gun uses each year.”
“The change reflects the Trump administration’s staunch Second Amendment advocacy, putting the president in lockstep with a gun lobby that’s long promoted the idea that a ‘good guy with a gun’ is the only thing that can stop a ‘bad guy with a gun,’” wrote reporter Jennifer Mascia.
Mascia describes herself as “a senior news writer and founding staffer at The Trace. She previously reported on gun violence at The New York Times and was a contributor to CNN’s Guns in America team.”
The above-mentioned Trace - the Bloomberg-financed anti-gun propaganda mill - explains, after a fashion:
Defensive gun use statistics are highly debated, and previous references to the range on the CDC’s website have been staunchly disputed by gun violence researchers. The low end of the range, 60,000, derives from the National Crime Victimization Survey, a twice-yearly poll of crime victims conducted by the federal government. The high end, 2.5 million, comes from surveys conducted in the early 1990s by a criminologist and self-described “gun control skeptic.” The lower stat is touted by researchers and academics, while the higher stat is favored by gun rights advocates who point to cases like the Idaho In-N-Out shooting, where an armed civilian engaged a mass shooter.
Turns out it wasn't just the Biden regime that wanted dissenting data body-checked out of the rink. It was the competition (emphasis added by me):
The “60,000 to 2.5 million” estimate appeared on the CDC’s website during the first Trump administration, but the agency removed it in 2022 after lobbying by a group of researchers that included Mark Bryant, who leads Gun Violence Archive, and Devin Hughes, who runs GVPedia, a nonprofit gun violence research outfit. (GVA is a data partner of The Trace, and Hughes was an early Trace contributor.) The revised language didn’t include a numerical estimate:
Estimates of defensive gun use vary depending on the questions asked, populations studied, timeframe, and other factors related to study design. Given the wide variability in estimates, additional research is necessary to understand defensive gun use prevalence, frequency, circumstances, and outcomes.
Bryant told The Trace that the CDC’s decision to restore the numbers was a “shame.”
If "Gun Violence Archive" (GVA) looks familiar - Big Media has made darn sure it is familiar. It has become the dead-tree media's accepted source on shootings, especially the mass-casualty events that've seized most of the headlines (especially since violent crime in general has been on the wane since the end of the pandemic madness).
And the thing is, while the "researchers" have their chanting points on the sources of defensive gun use data down, the stats on "mass shootings" themselves are deisgned to mislead:
According to Bryant’s all-inclusive definition, there were 417 mass shootings in 2019. The FBI says there were 30, because it uses a much narrower definition.
While the GVA collects and publishes several different types of shooting data – mass murders, number of children and teens killed or injured, officer-involved shootings, defenses gun usages and more – it is their inflated mass shooting numbers that are cited most often by the mainstream media, given its penchant for sensational headlines.
In an interview with the Second Amendment Foundation’s Investigative Journalism Project on Tuesday, Bryant defended his broader definition and the higher body count it yields. “It doesn’t parse,” he said. “It gives an accurate picture of the number of times more than four people were shot, whether in a drive-by or a shooting at a rap concert or a country music concert.”
If his higher numbers are misleading the public or being misinterpreted by journalists, it’s not his fault, Bryant claimed. He believes his numbers are fair. “I do, but I think it’s also up to the journalist and the reader to have a better understanding of what the data says. When a journalist uses the mass-shooting numbers as their lead, they’re not looking at the whole situation.”
That the media, elected officials and what he calls the “gun violence prevention” community, or GVP, are using his statistics is not in question.
The GVA version of "mass shooting" includes headline grabbing mass casualty events - spree killings at schools and offices - but also, mostly, gangland drive-bys, botched robberies, even some self defense shootings.
No matter. Numbers is numbers, as long as they uphold the narrative:
The Biden/Harris administration has cited Bryant’s data, as have a bevy of other elected officials and political candidates, at the local, state and federal level.
The New York Times, National Public Radio, USA Today and a host of other media outlets now use GVA’s broad definition when reporting about mass shootings.
"Sure, it's distorted data - but it's our distorted data!"
