If your goal is to take guns away from law-abiding American citizens — and for the Left, it absolutely is — you can get yourself a good head start by convincing Americans that they really don't need guns all that badly, because they are never used for self-defense anyway.
Which was one of the reasons the CDC stopped publicizing data about "Defensive Gun Uses" (DGUs) during the Biden administration - it wasn't serving their purposes:
At the request of gun-control activists such as Mark Bryant, founder of the Gun Violence Archive, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention removed its defensive gun-use data in May 2022. Bryant had complained that gun-rights advocates frequently cited the estimates to “stop [gun-control] legislation,”
That's pretty much literally the language used in the original, hilarious, smoking gun (as it were) email chain.
But there's a new sheriff in town at the CDC, and the facts are back:
In July 2026, the Trump administration restored the post as it originally appeared before the CDC removed it and has now corrected an error in the original version. This was the CDC’s original post.
The data builds on a study originally released in the early 1990s — that particular objection is true. It was also a time with considerably higher rates of violence, including gun crime per capita than today, so I call it a wash. As the critics of the original studies and the CDC's data point out, the data has been the subject of years of refinement and revision — and not in the direction that the gun grabbers like:
Gun control organizations, such as Michael Bloomberg’s The Trace were outraged, with titles such as “Inflated Claim About Guns and Self-Defense Returns to CDC Website.” The “inflated” claim was that the range of defensive gun uses ranged from 60,000 to 2.5 million.
The 60,000 estimate is from an earlier NCVS. The problem is that 2013 National Academies of Sciences (NAS) report warns the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) estimates are “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.
The CDC has now corrected the information that had been posted and eliminated the lower estimate of defensive gun uses that the NAS report had noted was problematic..The NAS report didn’t make it clear that the 500,000 number was just for handguns, and the top estimate from the NAS report was 3.7 million. But this is a big improvement over what had originally been put up at the CDC website.
The bad guys? They're not being so understanding. This is from the Trace, the Bloomberg-funded anti-gun PR mill:
The Trace reported last month that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had added a claim to its web page on firearm injury and death prevention stating that Americans use guns defensively an estimated 60,000 to 2.5 million times each year. On September 28, the CDC updated the defensive gun use estimate again, swapping out the lower number for a much higher one: 500,000.
The CDC did not state why they updated the number. They did not respond to The Trace’s request for comment.
The changes reflect 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.”
The Trace is letting its petulance run away with it: nobody says a "good guy with a gun" is the only way to stop the bad guys; deterrence, prosecuting other bad guys, and solid two-parent families all play a role.
But clearly they're not hurting anything, either.
