The CDC Censored Information On Defensive Gun Uses (DGUs)

On Saturday, Hot Air posted an article about the CDC’s censorship Defensive Gun Uses statistics.

The article reports:

Gun control activists know that Defensive Gun Uses (DGUs) are a thorn on their side because they make selling gun control harder. Therefore, in what can be uncharitably described as a conspiracy against the civil rights of The People, they mounted a months-long pressure campaign, using influence from a Democrat Senator and the White House, to privately meet with CDC officials to get higher-end DGU statistics removed from the CDC website.

Beth Reimels, Associate Director for Policy, Partnerships, and Strategic Communication at the CDC’s Division of Violence Prevention, said in one email to the three advocates on December 10th. “We will also make some edits to the content we discussed that I think will address the concerns you and other partners have raised.”

While conspiring with gun control activists behind closed doors, the CDC at the same time did not bother reaching out to the researcher whose higher-end DGU estimates were yanked from the CDC website:

Kleck, Professor Emeritus at Florida State University’s College of Criminology and Criminal Justice, stood by his research. He said the CDC did not reach out to him for his perspective before making the change. He argued the removal of the reference to his estimate was “blatant censorship” and said it was evidence of the politicization of the agency.

The article also notes the lack of media coverage of the censoring of the statistics:

What the CDC did was indeed censorship, but there’s more censorship at play here. And that’s the mainstream media’s complete and total blackout of this story. I have been following the news just about daily to see who does and doesn’t cover this story. So far, to the best of my knowledge, the only coverage from a large media organization has come from Fox News, who reported on the collusion between the CDC and gun control activists, and then followed up with another story on some Republicans in Congress demanding that the CDC reinstate the statistics. Other than these stories, there’s minor coverage at The Daily Caller, Real Clear Politics, and the New York Post which reports it as the “grumbling” of a researcher.

It seems as if some of our government agencies are not being honest about sharing important information with their fellow Americans.