Last August, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) webpage again posted defensive-gun-use (DGU) data—essentially, estimates of how many times per year armed citizens in America use guns to defend themselves or others.
This data had been removed from the CDC’s website during the Biden administration after gun-control activists, such as Mark Bryant, founder of the Gun Violence Archive, lobbied the CDC to remove DGU data. Bryant had complained that gun-rights advocates often cite the DGU estimates to as an argument against gun bans and other restrictions. Bryant actually wrote that the 2.5 million figure “needs to be killed, buried, dug up, killed again and buried again.”
Honest information, says the gun-control left, is too inconvenient to their preferred policy prescriptions; therefore goes their logic, comprehensive studies on DGUs should not be published on government websites.
Now the CDC has also taken down the lowest estimate of about 60,000 DGUs annually because it is a misleading statistic.
As John Lott, founder and president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, outlines in this episode of The Armed Citizen Podcast, “The 60,000 estimate is from an earlier National Academies of Sciences (NAS) report. The problem is that 2013 NAS report warns the National Crime Victimization Survey estimates are ‘difficult to interpret because respondents were not asked specifically about defensive gun use,’” said Lott. “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. Even the 500,000 figure should come with an asterisk, because that is from a study that was only looking at handguns used for self-defense.”
Telling the truth about these statistics is critical, as public opinion can be shaped by misinformation from gun-control groups which can then lead to bad public policy.
DGUs can be difficult to measure. As the CDC notes, estimates of the number of DGUs annually vary depending on study design, questions asked, populations studied, and time frames. 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 2026 National Firearms Survey done by William English, an assistant professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business, indicate that armed citizens defend themselves about 2.2 million times per year.
Nevertheless, the truth about the use of this constitutionally protected freedom is important to individuals who don’t want to be victims and for policy makers who want a safer nation. So, by including this range of data, the CDC is helping to give a fuller picture of how armed citizens factor into public safety and crime prevention.
