Somewhere between 60,000 and 2.5 million times a year, an armed American citizen stops a crime. Those numbers come from the CDC's own data, drawn from peer-reviewed research and a 2013 report by the National Academies for Science, Engineering, and Medicine titled "Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence."
The Biden administration decided you didn't need to know that.
The CDC under Biden quietly scrubbed its defensive gun use statistics from public-facing materials — the very data showing how frequently law-abiding gun owners prevent crimes, assaults, and worse. No press conference. No explanation. The numbers just disappeared. Now, under the Trump administration and Health Secretary RFK Jr., the CDC has restored the data in full.
The range is wide — 60,000 on the low end, 2.5 million on the high end — because defensive gun use is notoriously difficult to track. Most incidents never involve a trigger pull. Over 80% of defensive encounters involve brandishing the firearm, not firing it. No shots, no police report, no news crew. Just a crime that didn't happen because someone was armed.
That's the part the gun control lobby resists having in the conversation. If the mere presence of a firearm deters crime four out of five times it's used defensively, the "good guy with a gun" is the statistical norm. The CDC said so. The National Academies said so. The only people uncomfortable with those conclusions are the ones whose policy arguments depend on the public staying uninformed of them.
Naturally, the people who wanted the data gone have complaints about its return. Mark Bryant, who runs the Gun Violence Archive, called the restoration "a shame" and dismissed the figures as "nothing more than gross estimates based on limited surveys." Devin Hughes of GVPedia called the move "disappointing but unsurprising" and characterized it as "politically motivated laundering of disinformation."
"Disinformation." That's the word now for data published by the National Academies and hosted by the CDC. Peer-reviewed research becomes "disinformation" the moment it inconveniences the preferred narrative.
Both Bryant and Hughes have ties to the anti-gun advocacy ecosystem — GVPedia and the Gun Violence Archive are go-to citation mills for groups like Everytown and its media arm The Trace. Their objection is simply that the data is available. There's a difference between disputing methodology and demanding that the government hide the results. One is science. The other is politics wearing a lab coat.
The Biden-era removal had nothing to do with updated methodology or better data. Nobody produced a replacement. The numbers were pulled because they complicated the policy argument for restricting firearms. Federal health agencies exist to publish findings based on evidence. Suppressing inconvenient data is an editorial decision. The CDC under Biden made one.
The 2013 National Academies report that anchors these figures was commissioned during the Obama administration, incidentally. It came from the exact kind of institution that gun control advocates normally love to cite — until the findings go the wrong way.
The restoration puts the data back where it belongs: in public view, attributed to its sources, available to anyone who wants to evaluate it. The people calling it "disinformation" are welcome to produce better numbers.
They haven't in thirteen years. But the demand to hide the old ones was immediate.
