Firearms Owners Against Crime
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
The CDC isn’t likely to be on many gun owners’ Christmas card lists this year. Not after revelations that they removed defensive gun use statistics at the behest of gun control advocates. The decision to do that made it very clear that while the CDC may have been prohibited from advocating for gun control, that didn’t mean they wouldn’t help push it any way they can.
John Lott is one person who has been consistently vilified over his research that counters the anti-gun narrative. Now, he’s lashing out over the CDC’s actions.
For the second year in a row, the Centers for Disease Control has been caught ignoring science and letting liberal interest groups set its policies.
Now comes word that CDC is again allowing partisan politics to influence its policies. This time, gun control activists got the CDC to remove research from its website. Yet, the CDC is trusted to impartially dole out millions of dollars for public health research on firearms: From 2020 to 2022, the CDC and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) each spent about $50 million on such research.
Until May of this year, the CDC cited a 2013 National Academies of Sciences (NAS) report showing that the annual number of defensive gun uses ranged from about 64,000 to 3 million. The CDC website listed the upper figure at 2.5 million. But now, the CDC has removed from its website all of those numbers and even the link to the NAS report.
Now, this is what we know. We’ve covered this before. People are upset and disappointed in the CDC for allowing politics to override good science.
Yet lot argues this is a lot more common than just an instance like this:
Unfortunately, Democrats in Congress have earmarked the $100 million in research funding for public health researchers who are far to the left on gun control compared to criminologists or economists.
The CDC keeps making decisions based on politics, not science. It has shown that it is not able to divorce political views from decisions about who to fund. But, as researchers know all too well, the CDC isn’t unique. The government just can’t keep politics out of funding decisions.
I suggest you go and read the examples he provides because it’s worthy of your understanding just where Lott is coming from.
The truth is that there’s no reason for any of us to trust the CDC.
While officials decried the center’s hands supposedly being tied on gun research, that was never really the case. They could conduct unbiased research. They just couldn’t use taxpayer dollars to advocate for gun control. It was the CDC who interpreted that to be a ban on all gun research.
Now that the ban has been lifted, expect a further deluge of anti-gun studies, all while anything that may suggest guns save lives gets repressed. We already know why the research is garbage and now we have yet another reason to distrust the supposed science here.
The thing is if gun control were really such a universal good, an unassailable thing that unerringly reduces violent crime rates across the board, then why cook the books? If the data was always going to point toward positive outcomes for gun control then there’s no reason to pull this kind of crap.
Lott is right to criticize and call them out over this stuff.
https://bearingarms.com/tomknighton/2022/12/23/lott-cdc-politics-n65588