In 1994, criminology researcher and then-professor at Florida State University, Gary Kleck published a groundbreaking study in which he determined that, on average for the period of the study, there were more than 2.2 million defensive gun uses (DGU) per year. People were using guns to defend themselves, a narrative the left doesn't like.
Shocker: statists relentlessly attacked him. And why not? His findings did not support their narrative that firearms should be prohibited for individuals to own.
So imagine Professor Kleck’s surprise to discover that in an attempt to debunk his study, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) (you know, that agency that’s listed in the Constitution right beside the made-up central bank clause and the unicorn clause) grabbed tax cash to fund not just one, but three studies. And imagine his frustration to discover that when the CDC findings ended up agreeing with his, the CDC suppressed them!
Dailywire’s Ryan Saavedra sums up the whole insulting tale very, very well:
Newly discovered statistics from the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) that were never released to the public strengthen the argument for guns and blow a hole in the gun control narrative. The statistics show that guns are used in a defensive manner against crimes far more than they are used by criminals to commit crimes.
Yep. It turns out that in trying to debunk Kelck’s research, the CDC -- which, as Bob Adelman notes for The New American, gets more than $11 billion of my neighbors’ tax cash each year – spent three years doing three studies of crime stats and the defensive use of firearms for 1996, 1997, and 1998. Then, when the results didn’t serve the gun-grabbers’ utopian agenda of disarming the populace while militarizing the police... they quietly hid the studies.
Sorry CDC, but Mr. Kleck found them, and he reviewed them, and he made the information available to the people in the public who were forced to pay for the things. His conclusions:
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.
Shhh! We can’t let people know – even though they were forced to pay for the studies.
Imagine the people of the American Revolution accepting the idea of a British agency taking their tax cash to pay for a series of studies intended to help strip them of even more of their rights. The wrongdoings of the US government should not be overlooked or diminished. Its functionaries and politicians are taking your money to try to disarm you. At various levels, the government already has, and the egregious attempts will continue.
And to facilitate their toxic agenda, they hide real information about the importance of firearms for self-defense. This is the CDC, which also includes eighteen-year-old teen gang members in its stats for “children” killed with guns.
And, as Brian Doherty writes for Reason, in digging deep into Kleck’s review of the CDC studies regarding personal use of a gun to stop crime:
Kleck is less impressed with the fact that the question was only asked of people who admitted to owning guns in their home earlier in the survey, and that they asked no follow-up questions regarding the specific nature of the DGU incident… From Kleck's own surveys, he found that only 79 percent of those who reported a DGU "had also reported a gun in their household at the time of the interview," so he thinks whatever numbers the CDC found need to be revised upward to account for that. (Kleck speculates that CDC showed a sudden interest in the question of DGUs starting in 1996 because Kleck's own famous/notorious survey had been published in 1995.)
Any bets as to whether the CDC will do what he suggests, revising those stats upward? I’d rather hold onto my money than wager on it.
The trouble is that politicians won’t let us hold onto our money. They keep taking our earnings to fund their attempts to crush even more of our rights. As we toil each day to please customers and clients, to save and provide for families and loved ones, to create a world that’s safer for ourselves and our neighbors, the politicians take our earnings to attack our rights. It's no wonder my dad used to say:
“They spit in our faces and call it rain.”