The Defensive Gun Use Lie and the Gun Lobby’s Firehose of Falsehood - Part 10
The Defensive Gun Use Lie and the Gun Lobby’s Firehose of Falsehood - Part 10
The CDC and DGUs: Pushing back on the widespread DGU myth
By: Devin Hughes
This is Part 10 of a 12-part series debunking the defensive gun use myth.
Part 1 examined recent high-profile incidents of DGUs gone wrong, how the NRA has seized on the defensive gun use narrative to further its guns everywhere agenda, and what constitutes a DGU. Part 2 looked at the academic origins of the DGU myth and its massive flaws. Part 3 delved into why surveys of statistically rare events produce substantial overestimates. Part 4 explored the surprising parallel pro-gun academic Gary Kleck draws between defensive gun use and using cocaine. Part 5 explained how most DGUs reported in surveys are likely aggressive and illegal. Part 6 looked at the National Crime Victimization Survey’s DGU numbers as an alternative to private surveys. Part 7 investigated the lie that there are more defensive gun uses than offensive uses, and how that lie found its way into the 2013 National Academy of Sciences Report on firearms. Part 8 examined the Gun Violence Archive’s data on defensive gun use and how it debunks the widespread DGU myth. Part 9 looked at pro-gun attempts to resurrect the defensive gun use myth in recent years.
Today, we will examine the story of why the CDC removed flawed defensive gun use numbers from its “Fast Facts” website, and the resulting pro-gun firestorm.
Part 10: The CDC and DGUs: Pushing back on the widespread DGU myth
In the summer of 2021, I reached out to the CDC to correct the following statement on their Fast Facts page about firearms:
“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."
This is the same National Academy of Sciences report discussed earlier that contains inaccuracies about defensive gun use taken from Gary Kleck’s work. The CDC’s reference was unique on its page, not only because of the flawed and inaccurate work it was citing, but also because this was the only data external to the CDC that the Fast Facts page cited. Every other number on the page dealt with empirical data, not survey or study results, and came directly from the CDC.
Further, while the 2013 NAS report had only survey data to rely on, in 2021 the CDC had more than seven years of GVA data on defensive gun use that it could cite. This meant that the CDC’s reference was outdated as well as inaccurate. A more accurate range would have been 2,000 to 2.5 million.
Given some of the backlash and misinformation in conservative media channels around this work, I am going to detail the timeline of events and conversations with the CDC below.
My initial email to the CDC went unanswered. So I turned to Po Murray, the head of Newtown Action Alliance and a board member of GVPedia, to see if she had direct contact information. After she contacted Senator Dick Durbin’s office, she was able to obtain email addresses for members of the research team, and my initial email was resent.
This time, a reply was forthcoming which stated that the CDC would stand by the material on its Fast Facts page. In the response email (all the emails have been made publicly available here), the CDC made the following claim:
“The methodology used to capture defensive gun violence by the Gun Violence Archive represents a very small subset of people who have used guns defensively, and does not include individuals who might have used guns defensively, but not reported this use to law enforcement. e.g. a person who comes to the front porch with a gun to deter a stranger from trespassing on his/her property and then doesn’t think anything of it when the stranger leaves the property.”
In a follow-up, I explained why this statement was inaccurate:
“This claim of ‘a very small subset’ is factually inaccurate according to the very surveys cited to produce the range of defense gun uses on your fact sheet. The results produced by both the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) and Dr. Gary Kleck’s surveys indicate that police were informed about the alleged DGU in more than 60% of cases. Specifically, respondents to Kleck’s survey, which found 2.5 million DGUs annually, indicate that police were informed of or found out about 64.2% of the respondents’ alleged DGUs. This indicates empirical evidence of 1,605,000 DGUs should exist annually. Yet police and media reports collected by the Gun Violence Archive find fewer than 2,000 verified DGUs. Even assuming that only the 23.9% of cases where shots were fired (according to Kleck’s survey) are recorded, that would still mean 597,500 cases, yet empirical evidence for only 0.3% of those actually exists.
Given that both the NCVS and small private surveys such as Kleck’s explicitly reject the conclusion that “a very small subset” of people report DGUs to the police, this means one of two things:
The data from NCVS and Kleck’s surveys is entirely wrong about people reporting incidents to the police, and it is in reality a small subset. This would inherently mean that if the surveys are wrong about such a large percentage of their respondents, there is no reason to treat the rest of the surveys’ claims as accurate; or
The data from NCVS and Kleck’s surveys is correct that more than 60% of people with a DGU report the incident to the police. If that reporting percentage is correct, then GVA should be capturing the majority of overall DGUs, which in turn means that the overall DGU numbers produced by NCVS and Kleck are vast overestimates.
Unless one suggests that GVA misses more than 90% of DGUs that are reported to the police — even though no other researcher or organization has found more verified DGUs than GVA — it is clear that the CDC Factsheet is citing inaccurate information.”
This response quickly secured a meeting with CDC staff to go over the data.
At the last minute, Po and I invited Mark Bryant, the head of the Gun Violence Archive, to the meeting so he could answer any questions about GVA’s methodology directly. During the meeting, we reiterated our concerns about the DGU data that was cited, and recommended that either additional context be added to the numbers, or that the misleading information be removed with a note that further research was needed.
After a thorough internal review, the CDC decided on the latter approach, and in the spring of 2022, they updated the language on their website with more general language indicating that estimates of defensive gun use vary from study to study rather than relying on data from decades-old surveys.
This important change went largely unnoticed, with The Trace reporting on the removal months later, though even this mention was buried deep into a broader report of defensive gun use statistics.
However, The Trace’s reporting caught the eye of Konstadinos Moros, a pro-gun lawyer representing the California Rifle & Pistol Association, who submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to uncover what he felt could be “corrupt as hell” lobbying.
Six months later, Moros received the emails and forwarded them to Stephen Gutowski, a pro-gun commentator at The Reload. While Moros admitted that he was skeptical that there was much of a story there, Gutowski made the most of the situation to spark outrage by quoting a distraught Gary Kleck and selectively quoting from the emails to insinuate a months-long campaign of covert political lobbying.
The outrage came fast and furious.
Moros quickly pivoted from skeptical to horrified, calling for his political allies to pressure the CDC and launch an investigation. Amy Swearer of the Heritage Institute, in charge of their own DGU collection effort, denounced the change, accusing the CDC of having “no backbone or integrity” while further commenting that, “It's disgraceful that any government agency would be willing to play ball with such a group of intellectually dishonest scoundrels, much less become an active participant in the skullduggery.”
Dozens of pro-gun blogs, outlets, and YouTube channels jumped on the bandwagon, including Fox, Newsmax, Post Millennial, Breitbart, the Epoch Times, Real Clear Politics, and The Truth About Guns. All ran stories about the change, claiming politicization of the CDC. Pro-gun organizations from the NRA to Gun Owners of America were mere steps behind in their denunciations.
This pressure campaign led to comments from top Republican party leaders in both the House and Senate as well as a letter to the CDC requesting that the CDC reinstate the inaccurate information. The Epoch Times even went several steps further, alleging that the change was part of an underlying conspiracy to repeal the 2nd Amendment with “gun control science,” and for the Gun Violence Archive to get millions of dollars in grants from the CDC.
Of course none of this was true, but the gun lobby’s Firehose of Falsehood campaign was already in full swing, elevating isolated claims from three individuals (Gutowski, Moros, and Kleck) into a weeks-long, right-wing media feeding frenzy. Ironically, pro-gun activists organized the very thing they accused Po, Mark, and I of doing — a political pressure campaign.
The entire episode highlighted just how crucial false defensive gun use information is to the gun lobby, and the steps they will take to maintain and spread that disinformation.
Stay tuned for Part 11 of our 12-part series on defensive gun use, which will debunk the myth that defensive gun use is more effective at preventing injury than other forms of self-defense.
Devin Hughes is the President and Founder of GVPedia, a non-profit that provides access to gun violence prevention research and data.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay