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Feb. 1, 2023 - Epoch Times
22:29
Emails EXPOSE how CDC is Gearing Up for ‘Science-Based' Gun Control
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New emails, which just came out of the CDC, revealed the fact that gun control advocates pressured the top officials within that agency to hide the number of times per year that people use guns in self-defense.
You heard that right.
Gun control advocates successfully pressured the CDC to take down from their website the number of times that Americans use guns to defend themselves.
But the story actually gets a lot deeper than that, because it reveals a new line of attack that gun control advocates are using to gut the Second Amendment, something that they refer to as the science of gun control.
Because, after all, if the science says that guns are bad, then who are we to question that science?
However, let me back up for a quick moment and set the stage for you properly on what's really happening here.
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To start with, it's no secret that the Second Amendment, the right to keep and bear arms, is currently under attack on this country.
Politicians, all types of different groups and advocacy organizations, are working overtime to slowly but surely nibble away at our right to own guns.
However, one of the challenges to taking away people's gun rights is the fact that American public sentiment isn't really there.
That's because people, by and large, understand that they can use guns to protect themselves and their family, evidenced by the fact that during the nationwide riots that broke out in the year 2020, there was a massive spike of people purchasing guns for the very first time.
People instinctually know that if their home is broken into, if their business is being robbed, or if someone is trying to kill them on the street, well, by owning a gun, they can defend themselves, their life, their family, and their property.
And this is something that millions of Americans actually experience firsthand every single year.
In fact, up until May 2nd of last year, if you were to go over to the CDC's website, it said that every single year, somewhere between 60,000 and 2.5 million people defended themselves using a gun, which is quite a lot.
And it's a great argument for why the Second Amendment is necessary in today's day and age.
However, here's the kicker.
If you go to the CDC's website today, that statistic is no longer available.
On May 2nd of last year, it just magically disappeared, leaving many people to wonder why in the world did the CDC make that decision?
Why did they decide to drop those numbers?
Well, we no longer have to wonder.
That's because about a month ago, a news publication called The Reload obtained a treasure trove of emails from inside the CDC. And these emails, well, they reveal a shocking truth.
It turns out that advocates for gun control were meeting in private with CDC officials and successfully pressuring those officials to remove certain statistics from their website.
Specifically, the statistics that were hurting their gun control argument by showing people that guns were effective at protecting people's lives.
Now in practical terms, the email showed that several gun control advocacy organizations were introduced to the highest level officials within the CDC through their connections within the White House.
And the emails show that these gun control advocates, once they were actually put in touch with these CDC officials, they began issuing nonstop requests to change the wording on the gun violence FAQ.
For your reference, here's exactly what the CDC's website used to say prior to them making that change.
Quote, Although definitions of defensive gun use vary, it is generally defined as the use of a firearm to protect and defend oneself, family, others, and or property against crime or victimization.
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, as you can imagine, having the CDC's own website claim that there are potentially millions of people using guns to defend themselves every single year is not exactly helpful if your agenda is to do away with guns.
And so, after these groups pressured the CDC into changing that section, well, here's what it says today.
If you go to the website today, here's what you'll see.
Quote, Given the wide variability in estimates, additional research is necessary to understand defensive gun use prevalence, frequency, circumstances, and outcomes.
Now at this point you might be thinking to yourself, so what?
What's the big deal about the CDC making this change over on their website?
It seems like a minor issue.
And on the one hand, that's true.
It doesn't really matter.
But on the other hand, it does matter.
It matters a lot.
Because after looking into it, what appears to be happening is that removing these numbers is actually part of a calculated long-term plan by these gun control organizations to direct the future of government-funded research on gun violence.
And it's, of course, it's exactly this government-funded research that eventually translates into actual government policy.
Meaning, what they're working to do It's to create a scientific rationale for repealing the Second Amendment.
Now, if that sounds a little bit too far-fetched to you, well, let me show you a timeline of how these things progressed.
The numbers that the CDC used to have on their website originally came from two separate studies.
One study, published in 1994, was called The Incidence of Defensive Firearm Use by U.S. Crime Victims.
That study found that, on average, there were about 60,000 cases annually of Americans using guns to defend themselves.
Then, the very next year, in the year 1995, a gun researcher by the name of Dr.
Gary Kleck published another study called Arm Resistance to Crime, the Prevalence and Nature of Self-Defense with a Gun.
And according to Dr.
Kleck's research, he found that Americans were using guns, to protect themselves from criminal attacks, about 2.5 million times a year.
But here's where things, you can say, got a little bit weird.
Because you see, during our research for this episode, we discovered that in the late 90s, the CDC, they conducted their own study to determine the true number of these defensive gun incidents.
That study, conducted by the CDC itself in the late 1990s, confirmed the findings of Dr.
Kleck, that there were millions of people every single year who used a gun for self-defense.
Millions of people.
However, interestingly, the CDC never published their findings.
They conducted their study, but they buried their report and never presented it to the public.
In fact, the only reason that we know about this secret report's existence is because Dr.
Kleck himself discovered it while digging through the online archives on the CDC's website.
Now, in terms of why the CDC decided to hide this report, well, here was what Dr.
Kleck said on the matter after discovering it.
Quote, Another factor, however, might also have played a role in the decision of the CDC personnel to now report the defensive gun use findings.
Meaning that in Dr. Klein's Kleck's opinion, the CDC never published their data because it would make it harder to disarm people.
And there might actually be some real truth to that opinion.
Because you see, many people assume that the CDC only became politicized recently, with their response to COVID and the pandemic.
But that appears to not really be the case.
You see, back during the 1990s, this man here, Dr.
Mark Rosenberg, was the director at the CDC for their National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, the agency that was in charge of conducting that study on self-defense with firearms.
But Dr.
Rosenberg does not appear to have been just a neutral actor conducting scientific studies without bias, evidenced by the fact that in 1994, here's what he was quoted as saying inside of a Washington Post article.
Quote, We need to revolutionize the way we look at guns, like what we did with cigarettes.
It used to be that smoking was a glamour symbol.
Cool, sexy, macho.
Now it is dirty, deadly, and banned.
Now, I'm not a scientist, but that does not really sound like an objective approach.
Instead, it sounds like the director of the CDC agency had a conclusion in his mind that he wanted the science to justify.
And wouldn't you know it, when the CDC study found something else, it was just buried six feet under and never made public.
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However, all of that was in the 1990s, a while ago.
And so if we fast forward a little bit to the year 2013, that was when President Barack Obama issued 23 different executive orders related to gun violence.
And one of those executive orders directed the CDC to convene a committee, a committee of gun experts, to conduct a scientific investigation into gun violence.
The CDC did just that, and later in the year, they released a report titled Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence.
And within that particular report, there is a subsection on the defensive use of guns.
Here's specifically part of what that section states.
Quote, And it was exactly this report,
commissioned by President Obama and conducted by the CDC in the year 2013, that was hyperlinked on the CDC's website before they removed it.
And so really take this in for a moment.
Not only did the secret report that the CDC published in the 1990s, but even this report commissioned by President Obama in 2013, they both found the same thing to be true, that there are many cases, potentially millions of cases, of Americans using a gun every single year to defend themselves.
Regardless of what President Obama and the officials at the CDC might wish to be true, the different reports continue time and time again to show that this is the case.
Which then makes what happened last year very concerning.
Because according to the emails that I alluded to earlier, the CDC decided to remove those statistics from their website simply based upon a request from gun control advocates.
And we have the emails on hand.
But before we dive into the emails themselves, there's actually one organization that I still need to introduce you to.
It's called the Gun Violence Archive, or GVA for short.
You can see their website up on your screen.
And the Gun Violence Archive is a nonprofit which serves as essentially a repository of data That comes in from all across the country, tracking the instances where guns were used.
And so they track things like the total number of shootings in a year, the total number of homicides, of people killing themselves with a gun, things like mass shootings, shootings that involve the police, and so on and so forth.
Basically, they track everything and anything and everything that have to do with guns being discharged.
According to an interview with the executive director of this particular organization, Mr.
Mark Bryant, they achieved this by having a team of about 20 people search the internet on a daily basis and pulling from a collection of 7,500 sources in order to find stories of shootings.
They pull from things like local news reports, social media reports, police reports, and so on.
And generally, their website is pretty good at tracking the number of gun-related incidents in a given year.
However, there's a very important aspect to note about the Gun Violence Archive, and this is important because this particular organization will very likely be heavily used in any future plans to implement a science of gun control.
You see, unlike the CDC's website and these different studies that we alluded to, which say that there are somewhere between 60,000 to 2.5 million guns used in self-defense every single year, Over on the Gun Violence Archive website, that number is claimed to be closer to 1,000.
For instance, in their 2022 annual report, the Gun Violence Archive claims that there were only 1,163 defense abuses of a gun throughout the entire country in the entirety of the year.
Now, you might be asking yourself, how could that number be so low?
And the answer is that it depends on how you track the number of self-defense incidents.
Because very often, a person might just brandish a gun, And that's enough to send the criminal packing.
You might be in a dangerous situation.
You might unholster your gun and point it at the would-be robber, and that's enough to stop him from robbing you.
And then afterwards, you might not even report the incident to the cops.
And so how do you keep track of something like that?
And the answer is you basically can't.
According to their own website, The researchers over at the Gun Violence Archive do not take into account stories which were not reported to the authorities.
Which then, naturally enough, makes their official self-defense numbers very low.
Multiple studies, surveys conducted by the CDC itself, found millions of these cases happening throughout the country every single year.
But the Gun Violence Archive says that the real number is closer to just 1,000.
And so, why does that matter?
It's simple.
According to the emails that were just released from inside of the CDC, gun control advocates wanted the CDC to change what's on their website in order to be consistent with what's reported in the gun violence archive.
And so, let's go through these emails step by step.
And just for your reference, in order to make it easy to keep track of everyone who's talking to one another in these emails, on the graphic on your screen, I color-coded people so you can easily keep track.
Those in blue are from inside the White House, those in yellow are gun control advocates, and those in green are people inside of the CDC. And so, on July 6th of 2021, a gun control advocate named Devin Hughes sent an email to the CDC's general media account requesting that the CDC revise their gun violence fact sheet.
In that particular email, Mr.
Hughes tried to discredit the data that was on the CDC's website and suggested that they change the methodology to be consistent with the numbers on the gun violence archive.
However, it looks like Mr.
Hughes didn't really get any response.
And so, what he did is that one month later, Mr.
Hughes sent that very same email to a woman named Poe Murray, who is the chairwoman for the Newton Action Alliance, which is a gun control organization.
Then, on August 6th, Ms.
Poe Murray emailed two people in the White House.
Ms.
Hannah Bristol, who is a senior advisor at the White House, and Mr.
Adrian Sainz, who is a special assistant to the president.
She asked both of them to help connect both her and Mr.
Hughes to someone over at the CDC, which is exactly what the White House officials began to do.
However, interestingly enough, the scientists over at the CDC, they weren't thrilled about having these gun control advocates trying to use their White House connections to wedge themselves in.
That's because once word got around that this was happening, The scientists inside of the CDC, the ones who were actually responsible for posting these numbers, they began to defend themselves.
Here's, for instance, what Ms.
Linda Dahlberg, the Associate Director for Science over at the CDC, here's what she wrote in an internal email.
We stand by our fact sheet, which essentially points out that estimates of defensive gun use vary depending on the data source, questions asked, populations studied, time frames, and other factors related to the design of studies.
Then you also had Ms.
Deborah Hurry, who is the acting principal deputy director at the CDC. Basically, she was the number two at the agency right behind Dr.
Rochelle Walensky, and she came out also to defend the numbers that were on the CDC website.
Here's what she wrote in an email.
Quote, 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 to law enforcement.
With the number of studies and estimates used for this range in the fact sheet, an update is not warranted at this time.
Okay, so that sounds sensible.
However, this is where things get interesting.
Because that email, the one we just read from the number two director of the CDC, was then forwarded by the White House advisor back to the gun control advocates.
And that White House advisor, at the very bottom of that forwarded email, well, she added a very short sentence.
Here's what she added.
The President's budget request asks for funding for firearm violence prevention, which will facilitate data collection and research in these areas.
Now, the inclusion of that little line is interesting because you could easily interpret it as a concession.
Something like, well, based on the CDC director's email, we can't really change anything now, but rest assured, more studies are on the way and they're addressing the issue.
But regardless of that concession, the very next day, which was September 2nd, one of the gun control advocates, Mr.
Devin Hughes, he wrote a response email to the CDC director explaining once again why he disagreed with their methodology and why it needs to be replaced.
In that particular email, Mr.
Hughes essentially reiterates his opinion that only what is on the Gun Archive website is accurate, and he pushed everyone to have a Zoom meeting to discuss further details.
And the emails show that once he made that suggestion, the wheels were in motion to coordinate a time when the leadership of the CDC could have a virtual meeting with these gun control advocates and potentially their White House friends.
The meeting eventually took place on September 15th, where indeed several senior employees over at the CDC and various gun control organizations, they had a virtual meeting to discuss the science behind collecting self-defense gun data.
Now, what exactly happened in that meeting isn't clear.
We don't have the meeting notes, but the very next day, The executive director of the Gun Violence Archive, the supposedly nonpartisan organization that's just there to collect data, well, the executive director of that organization sent a follow-up email to the CDC. In that email, he thanked them for the meeting,
and then he also, quote, expressed his frustration with a 2.5 million figure based on the CDC website because it remains canon by gun rights folks and their supporting politicians and is used as a blunt instrument against gun safety regulations every time there is a state or federal level hearing.
The defensive gun use should be removed altogether until valid numbers can be gleaned by peer-reviewed studies.
In either case, that 2.5 million number needs to be killed, buried, dug up, killed again, and buried again.
Now I'm not a scientist, but that email from the supposedly nonpartisan organization sounds like advocacy to me, but what do I know?
Regardless, it appears that this meeting was a success.
That's because just three short months later, the CDC emailed Mr.
Hughes to confirm that they were planning on making some updates to their gun FAQ website in early 2022.
And then, wouldn't you know it, in May of 2022, the CDC made good on their promise by removing the statistics altogether and replacing it with a generic statement saying that further research needs to be done.
And so, this was what was happening behind the scenes.
And the reason that all this matters is because what we described is only step one.
You see, the narrative surrounding almost any issue nowadays is to follow the science.
In fact, you might remember how from the year 2020 up until 2022, almost every new piece of government policy was attributed to the science, as well as to recommendations coming from the CDC, whether it was regarding masks, vaccines, All these policies were driven largely by the science over at the CDC. And it appears that gun control advocates
took this fact to heart.
And so, the plan appears to be to replace the numbers that were over on the CDC's website previously with the new numbers, showing that very few people use guns for self-defense.
And based on these new figures, well, it'll be very easy for politicians to make the argument that gun ownership for self-defense is not really that important.
They'll be able to point to the CDC's website, which will be using data from the Gun Violence Archive to say that almost nobody uses guns for self-defense in a given year.
And if you dare to criticize that data on the CDC's website, Well, then you will be criticizing science itself.
And this is not speculation.
For instance, in an interview with Trace Magazine, here's what the executive director for the Gun Violence Archive said on the matter.
What if something happens to our primary funders?
What happens if I find myself under a coal truck?
We have a transition process in place.
So if I go away, things continue.
I think in another five years, the CDC might have a project together that will collect much of the data.
Just last month, the CDC posted a new $9 million grant opportunity over on their website for any researchers wanting to quote,"...inform firearm-related violence and prevention strategies." And so this is what's been happening behind the scenes.
If in the next few months you begin to hear more and more about a so-called science of gun control, you at least now know what's going on.
If you'd like to go deeper into anything that we discussed in today's episode, I'll throw all my research notes, including the actual emails from inside the CDC, I'll throw all them down into the description box below.
And also, I'd love to know your thoughts about all this.
Do you think that if we continue down this road, We will actually have a situation where gun control activists will be conducting all this future government research, which will then be used as the basis for any future gun control policies by the government.
Or, do you actually agree and think that these statistics should have been removed because they are such a large and broad range of numbers from 60,000 to 2.5 million, and since the true figure is so hard to figure out, well, you should remove it altogether.
Or, Thirdly, do you think that the Second Amendment is clear-cut and what happens over at the CDC doesn't really matter because our right to keep and bear arms shouldn't be infringed no matter what?
I'd love to know your thoughts.
Please leave them in the comments section below.
I'll be reading them later today as well as into the weekend.
And then lastly, I'd like to give a big shout-out to Mr.
Eric Schumacher, our awesome researcher who helped pull together and make sense of all these different documents, emails, and interviews, which was, quite frankly, no small feat.
And I'm sure that if he could, Eric would remind you to smash, smash, smash those like and subscribe buttons so that this video can be shared out to ever more people.
And then, until next time, I'm your host, Roman from the Epoch Times.
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