CDC Buried Data Supporting Defensive Use of Firearms
Tuesday, 24 April 2018
CDC Buried Data Supporting Defensive Use of Firearms
Written by Bob Adelmannat New American
Gary Kleck, a criminologist now retired from Florida State University, was likely astonished to learn that his controversial study, The National Self-Defense Survey, was accurate after all. He and FSU fellow professor Marc Gertz concluded, based on their carefully-crafted surveys conducted in 1993, that there were more than 2.2 million defensive gun uses (DGU) each year in the United States. The results were presented in 1994, published in 1995, and have been incessantly attacked by the anti-gun movement ever since. His conclusions didn’t fit the anti-gun narrative that guns are used in crimes far more than in self-defense and therefore private ownership must be abolished.
Kleck just learned that almost immediately after the publication of his study, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), a federal agency that receives more than $11 billion of taxpayer money every year, conducted its own study of the matter. It conducted three separate studies, in fact, and each of them came to the same conclusion as Kleck and Gertz: Indeed, about 2.5 million Americans use guns to defend themselves or their families every year.
But the CDC studies were never published.
It would have infuriated the powers-that-be in the Clinton administration, and so the results were buried.
After reviewing the newly-discovered/recovered studies, Kleck — in his best professorial manner — wrote:
The final adjusted prevalence of 1.24% [of the population experiencing a DGU in the past twelve months] therefore implies that in an average year during 1996-1998, 2.46 million U.S. adults used a gun for self-defense. This estimate, based on an enormous sample of 12,870 cases (unweighted) in a nationally representative sample, strongly confirms the 2.5 million past-12-months estimate obtained [by me and Marc] Gertz in 1995 … CDC’s results, then, imply that guns were used defensively by victims about 3.6 times as often as they were used offensively by criminals.
Kleck added, “CDC never reported the results of those surveys, does not report on their website any estimates of DGU frequency, and does not even acknowledge that they ever asked about the topic in any of their surveys.” MORE HERE: https://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/crime/item/28829-cdc-buried-data-supporting-defensive-use-of-firearms
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There’s a lot of controversy over exactly what the CDC was doing in regard to gun violence research and whether or not the NRA involvement helped stop the CDC from publishing biased information and aiding the anti-gunners or if the NRA stopped the CDC from doing legitimate and unbiased research.
As a physician observer contemporaneously, I saw the liberals in power task the CDC with developing data that could persuade Americans to ban firearms. The CDC was working closely with a number of gun control advocacy groups, pumping out flawed conclusions to be used in arguing for more gun control.
The American Academy of Pediatrics was one of the groups that worked with CDC and published much about gun violence involving children and/or suicide as a reason for gun control. The AAP, a quintessential progressive group enraptured with liberal policies and politically-correct thinking, is an organization that sets standards of Pediatric practice. In devising “best practices” for preventive Pediatric care, the AAP included Pediatricians asking their patients about guns in the home and then lecturing the families about the health risks of having guns in the home and teaching parents about the need for gun control.
When the NRA became aware that the CDC, which, along with the NIH and most medically oriented groups, agencies or institutions of medical learning and training are dedicated to liberal policies, was deliberately pushing their slanted version of the truth, the NRA went into action mode. The CDC was developing studies where, like in the article, they emphasized their biased conclusions of dishonest “research” and neglected to mention any findings that did not fit their narrative. NRA informed a number of lawmakers about the CDC working with others to advance gun control by spending taxpayer millions to develop “fake news” to sway public opinion. Of course, using taxpayer funds to sponsor data that argues for gun control or any special interest agenda is an affront to science, is unethical and against the law. The CDC got its hands slapped and they were prohibited from continuing down that false path. And the NRA took flak for alegedly halting “legitimate scientific investigation.”