The Next CDC Director Must Restore Defensive Gun Use Statistics And Unredact Secret Conversations

The gun control movement took an all-of-government approach to attacking our rights during the past four years. The CDC has been one the weapons they wielded to bludgeon our freedom. Some of their mischief has been open and brazen, and some has been sneaky.

One of the sneak attacks was getting the CDC to yank Defensive Gun Use (DGU) statistics from the CDC website in 2022, during the tenure of CDC Director Rochelle Walensky. For those readers who aren’t aware, the CDC used to have Defensive Gun Use (DGU) statistics on their website. Gun control activists hated the fact that the government, which is run using money from tax paying pro-Second Amendment citizens, had data showing that the Second Amendment is a good thing. They pressured and colluded with the CDC to remove those statistics from their website. 

You can see the change yourself in the Internet Archive snapshots of the CDC website.

In a snapshot taken on May 2, 2022 @ 21:43:00 UTC, you can see the DGU statistics::

https://web.archive.org/web/20220502214300/https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/firearms/fastfact.html

It’s a small paragraph, but it’s a pro-Second Amendment paragraph nonetheless:

What is defensive gun use? How often does it occur?

Although definitions of defensive gun use vary, it is generally defined as the use of a firearm to protect and defend one’s self, family, others, and/or property against crime or victimization.

Estimates of defensive gun use vary depending on the questions asked, populations studied, timeframe, and other factors related to the design of studies. 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.

But then, suddenly in the snapshot taken on May 6, 2022 @ 02:12:57 UTC, those statistics vanished, and remain so to this day:

https://web.archive.org/web/20220506021257/https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/firearms/fastfact.html

At some point between Monday May 2, 2022 @ 21:43:00 UTC (5:43 PM Eastern Time), and Friday May 6, 2022 @ 02:12:57 UTC (Thursday, May 5, 2022 @ 10:12:57 PM Eastern Time), someone at the CDC went in and removed those statistics.

The Internet Archive was recently hacked. If the above snapshots go offline in the future for any reason, you can find alternative snapshots, albeit with a much bigger time window, on Archive.is:

Before: 5 Apr 2022 18:13:30 UTC
https://archive.is/gHPDx

After: 27 Jan 2023 02:44:15 UTC
https://archive.is/0sXG4

This scandal was revealed when a gun control activist bragged about it on social media, prompting a FOIA request from CRPA Attorney Kostas Moros, who shared the FOIA’d documents with The Reload founder Stephen Gutowski.

The FOIA’d documents were heavily redacted. You can see the obscenity of the “transparent” Biden administration in the 100% redacted 19 pages at the below link (archived links):

https://cdn.thereload.com/app/uploads/2022/12/CDC-DGU-18-redacted-pages.pdf

Some of the unredacted and partially redacted documents revealed that the Biden CDC met and colluded with gun control activists. My takeaways from Stephen Gutowski’s report are:

• The CDC met privately with gun control activists.
• One CDC official even called the gun control activists “partners” in an email.
• They agreed with gun control activists’ demands to remove the Defensive Gun Use statistics.
• They didn’t reach out to the researchers whose statistics they removed from the CDC website.
• Not all conversations were recorded or have a paper or electronic trail.
• The CDC tried to hide some of the collusion by redaction when served with a FOIA request.

To add insult to injury, the bigger scandal, in my opinion, was the total media blackout of the scandal. I wrote about this on December 31, 2022.

Now that gun controllers have been kicked out of power, it’s time to seek redress for these assaults on our freedoms.

First and foremost, the new CDC Director must restore the DGU statistics on the CDC website, and go well beyond that. A short paragraph, a mere acknowledgment of the positive use of firearms, will not suffice anymore. Previously, the gun rights side was content with a mere hat-tip to the Second Amendment, but even that rankled the gun control activists. It’s time to force the CDC to tell the truth about defensive gun use. We should demand a complete write-up and several detailed studies of defensive gun use. Gun control activists need to be taught a hard lesson if they can’t even tolerate a token blurb on the CDC website.

Second, we need redress for the redaction, secrecy, and collusion. The next CDC Director must unredact and release every last bit of communication between gun control groups and the CDC. If everything was done in accordance with the law, why are they so afraid that they had to redact an entire 19 pages? Let’s find out what the gun control activists said, and if there was any political activism on the part of supposedly nonpartisan CDC apparatchiks.

President-elect Donald Trump has nominated Rep. David Weldon for the CDC Director position. This role used to be filled either by an internal career employee, or as a political appointment without Senate confirmation. However, that apparently changed with the 2023 Consolidated Appropriations Act. Starting with President-elect Trump’s second term, the CDC Director position will require Senate confirmation.

Senators who claim to support the Second Amendment must ask Rep. Weldon about what he will do about the memory-holed DGU statistics and redacted communications before they confirm him to the CDC Director position.