A years-long absence has ended on the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website.
Statistics measuring how often Americans use firearms to defend themselves have reappeared after gun control activists had previously pressured the agency into deleting them entirely.
The restored data spans a wide range, estimating between 60,000 and 2.5 million instances of defensive gun use occur across the country each year.
In most of these instances, no shot was ever fired. Simply displaying or referencing a firearm was enough to defuse a threatening encounter before it escalated.
Gun control activists had celebrated the original removal of this data during the Biden administration. Its reappearance on the CDC site has now triggered swift condemnation from figures within that movement.
Mark Bryant, executive director of the Gun Violence Archive, spoke with The Trace, an outlet affiliated with the gun control organization Everytown. Bryant labeled the CDC’s reversal a “shame.”
He went on to dismiss the underlying research, describing the defensive gun use estimates as “nothing more than gross estimates based on limited surveys.”
Devin Hughes, who runs the firearms research website GVPedia, was also contacted by The Trace for comment. Hughes described the CDC’s decision as “disappointing but unsurprising.”
Hughes did not stop there.
He accused the current administration of manipulating science for political ends, stating, “It is the politically motivated laundering of disinformation that has become a hallmark of the Trump administration’s approach to all scientific inquiry, and gun violence is no exception.”
GVPedia, the site Hughes operates, hosts what it calls a “comprehensive fact sheet that details important considerations for gun ownership.”
Among its central claims: that expanding firearm access drives up both deaths and assaults nationwide.
That same fact sheet also argues that instances of defensive gun use are “rare compared to gun harm,” a claim that a range of independent surveys has repeatedly contradicted.
National crime figures tell a different story than the one activists describe.
Homicide rates have dropped to their lowest point in at least 70 years, and violent crime overall has continued a downward trajectory in recent years.
This decline has occurred even as gun purchases have surged. Roughly one million firearms are sold across the United States every single month.
Mathematical comparisons further complicate the activists’ position.
Using even the most conservative published figure of 65,000 annual defensive gun uses, that number still surpasses the combined yearly total of all firearm-related homicides and suicides in the country.
Separately, an estimated 80,000 non-fatal firearm injuries occur annually, a category encompassing both accidental discharges and criminal assaults.
When measured strictly against the National Crime Victimization Survey, the rate of firearm-related harm comes out to roughly double the rate of defensive gun uses.
That comparison, however, relies on just one data source.
Numerous other studies examining the same question have arrived at far larger estimates for how often Americans use guns defensively.
Among them is the 2021 National Firearms Survey, which put the annual figure at 1.67 million defensive gun uses.
That total is more than ten times greater than the combined number of gun-related deaths and injuries recorded nationwide each year.
The CDC itself has stopped short of endorsing any one study as authoritative on this question.
The agency’s website acknowledges substantial variation among existing estimates and directs readers to a 2013 report published by the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, titled “Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence.”
Whether this data remains publicly accessible on the CDC’s website going forward may hinge on future shifts in federal leadership, as gun control organizations continue to challenge any government acknowledgment of defensive firearm use.
