The Trace reported last month that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had added a claim to its web page on firearm injury and death prevention stating that Americans use guns defensively an estimated 60,000 to 2.5 million times each year. On September 28, the CDC updated the defensive gun use estimate again, swapping out the lower number for a much higher one: 500,000.
The CDC did not state why they updated the number. They did not respond to The Trace’s request for comment.
Defensive gun use statistics are highly debated, and previous references to the range on the CDC’s website were removed during the Biden administration at the behest of researchers and gun safety advocates.
The changes reflect the Trump administration’s staunch Second Amendment advocacy, putting the president in lockstep with a gun lobby that’s long promoted the idea that “a good guy with a gun” is the only thing that can stop “a bad guy with a gun.”
Devin Hughes, who runs GVPedia, a nonprofit gun violence research outfit, had lobbied the CDC for the removal of the defensive gun use estimates in 2022. He told us in July that their reinsertion was “disappointing but unsurprising.” These latest changes, he told The Trace, are a major setback.
“Now search engines and AI chatbots will repeat the CDC’s false figure to Americans trying to make honest decisions about gun safety,” he said.
The September update was first reported by John Lott, an economist and gun researcher whose conclusions have been debunked by experts. Lott has been a strong proponent of expanding the figures on defensive gun use.
The 60,000 figure came from the National Crime Victimization Survey, a twice-yearly poll of crime victims conducted by the federal government. The 500,000 figure, as well as the 2.5 million figure, can be attributed to Florida State University professor Gary Kleck.
Kleck surveyed 5,000 adults by phone in 1993 and asked if they or their household members had used a gun for self-defense in the past five years, even if it wasn’t fired. Just over 1 percent of respondents said they had. Kleck extrapolated that figure to the entire adult population of 200 million, concluding that Americans use guns for self-defense as often as 2.1 million to 2.5 million times a year.
Researchers have found issues with Kleck’s estimates. While the adult population in the United States in 1993 was around 200 million people, not all of them owned guns — only about 42 percent did. So extrapolating the survey results to the entire adult population yields an overestimate.
Kleck has argued that respondents underreport defensive gun use because they fear the authorities. In some states, pointing a weapon at someone can lead to an arrest. Even if they’re eventually cleared, “you’ve lost thousands of dollars in legal fees, had your reputation ruined, maybe had your picture and name in the newspaper,” he told The Trace in 2022.
But Hughes said Kleck’s work extrapolated data from highly unusual circumstances. “Surveys of rare events reliably produce wildly inflated numbers, and defensive gun use is no different,” he said.