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The CDC on Self-Defense

Paul Jacob demands to see the data.

This April, a Nashville homeowner shot an intruder intent on burglary.

Also this month, a St. Louis apartment dweller shot an intruder who threatened to kill his family.

A Newport Beach homeowner recently shot an intruder as well.

Aside from the obvious, what do such incidents, often in newspapers, have in common? The government is hiding research about them.

In December 2022, Fox News reported that to appease gun control activists, the Centers for Disease Control had deleted reference to a study on how often guns are used in self-​defense from its published research.

The CDC-​commissioned study by Gary Kleck showed that “instances of defensive gun use occur between 60,000 and 2.5 million times” annually. But in 2021, after being lobbied by the gun control activists, the CDC pretended that Kleck’s study didn’t exist.

Kleck said: “CDC is just aligning itself with the gun-​control advocacy groups.… ‘We are their tool, and we will do their bidding.’ And that’s not what a government agency should do.”

CDC’s conduct was not new. In 2018, Capital Research had asked why the agency was “Hiding Its Defensive Gun Use Statistics.”

For decades, we’ve had abundant data on how gun owners defend themselves from violent bad guys. CDC, which investigates something or other related to this subject, won’t share all that it knows.

We can’t legally require the media to stop hiding critical information. But we should be able to require our government to stop doing so.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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6 replies on “The CDC on Self-Defense”

The “modern and progressive” government as morphed into a controller as opposed to servant.
Ask not what your country can do for you but rather what it can and seeks to do to you.

Lie of omission is still a lie.
Tax dollar-​funded misinformation.
The levels of qualifications of the people doing that ought to be sufficient proof of this being intentional. They are entitled to their own opinion, but in office this is covert undermining of the constitution in support of a leftist narrative. Which is, at a minimum, theft of office and violation of their oath of office. At its worst interpretation, it is undermining the principles and policies of the United States, attempting to weaken our abilities to defend ourselves, and insurrection.
What the left accuses the right of doing, while doing themselves.

That was my first thought, too. But doctors everywhere are taking control of the issue. It’s a workaround.

It just shows you how useless the Republicans are that when they had the power, they didn’t put a stop to this sort of mission creep.

The legislation that enables the CDC plainly does not put within its scope things such as traffic accidents or gun violence. 

But, on the one hand, many people don’t see a distinction between a claim that X ought to be done and that institution Y ought to do X, and the political left is especially but not exclusively prone to hijacking institutions. And, on the other hand, if some political coalition were to attempt to wrest the CDC away from the hijackers, the mainstream of the media would insist that this effort were to silence doctors.

That the agitators had hijacked the institution would either not be acknowledged or would be treated as a noble act. A point that the agitators were not behaving as medical scientists would either be ignored or mocked.

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