As of Aug. 24, 2026, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) webpage is again providing defensive-gun-use (DGU) data.
The Biden administration, at the behest of gun-control groups that want to shape anti-gun narratives in the media, dropped scientific surveys that indicate how many times armed citizens annually use their guns for self-defense.
The Trump administration’s CDC is again publishing this well-established data.
The CDC’s “About Firearm Injury and Death” page now says, “The report Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence indicates a range of 60,000 to 2.5 million defensive gun uses each year.”
The 60,000-2.5 million range is not a CDC survey estimate. The CDC is citing the National Academies’ report. The CDC notes that estimates of DGUs vary depending on study design, questions asked, populations studied, and timeframes.
Lower estimates, such as from the National Crime Victimization Survey, only cite reported crimes and so miss unreported defensive incidents; whereas higher estimates, such as from the survey of 54,000 Americans done by William English, an assistant professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business who supervised the 2021 National Firearms Survey, include incidents from those surveyed in which no police report was filed.
Data from the Georgetown survey indicated that citizens use their guns defensively about 1.67 million times annually; also, this survey found that “in most defensive incidents (81.9 percent) no shot was fired.”
Gun-control groups, and all the media outlets who reprint their propaganda, don’t like these numbers because they show how critical Americans’ Second Amendment-protected rights are.
By including this range of data, the CDC is helping to give a fuller picture of how firearms factor into public safety and injury prevention. This aligns with the agency’s broader injury prevention work under its National Center for Injury Prevention and Control.
Incredibly, gun-control groups—such as the Gun Violence Archive and the Newtown Action Alliance—actually lobbied the CDC during the Biden administration to get the CDC to remove the DGU estimates from its website. Emails obtained via Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests (first reported by The Reload in late 2022) showed a months-long pressure campaign by gun-control groups in 2021. The anti-gun groups objected to the CDC’s “Fast Facts” page on firearm violence prevention, which cited the range of 60,000 to 2.5 million annual DGUs.
For example, Mark Bryant, who founded the Gun Violence Archive, wrote that the 2.5 million figure “needs to be killed, buried, dug up, killed again and buried again.”
The anti-gun groups argued that the numbers hindered gun-control policy efforts—the truth has a way of doing that.
The gun-control groups’ pressure on what was an anti-gun administration was effective; after gun-control group leaders reportedly got a private virtual meeting with CDC staff on Sept. 15, 2021, the CDC took down the data in 2022.
As the data is very counter-narrative to the gun-control groups' goals, they would rather it did not exist. Since it does exist, however, their next best option is to obscure it from the public. A government website, however, should not be partisan—especially, when it comes to good, scientific data that is helpful to citizens who want to, you know, stay alive.
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