Shortly after the shooting in Newtown Mr. Obama issued 23 executive orders that he claimed would help reduce gun violence in the United States. One of those orders said, “Issue a Presidential Memorandum directing the Centers for Disease Control to research the causes and prevention of gun violence.” It’s been half of a year since those executive orders were issued and the Center for Disease Control (CDC) has completed it’s study. What did it find out? The opposite of what it was planned to find out:
1. Most gun deaths in the US are due to suicide, not violent crimes with guns or accidental shootings. This is a said statistic, but again, this goes back to mental healthcare, not guns.
“Between the years 2000-2010, firearm-related suicides significantly outnumbered homicides for all age groups, annually accounting for 61 percent of the more than 335,600 people who died from firearms related violence in the United States.” [Source]
2. Mass shootings account for a negligible amount of crime in the US. In fact, mass shootings are one of the rarest forms of violent crime in the country.
“The number of public mass shootings of the type that occurred at Sandy Hook Elementary School accounted for a very small fraction of all firearm-related deaths. Specifically, since 1983 there have been 78 events in which 4 or more individuals were killed by a single perpetrator in a day in the United States, resulting in 547 victims and 476 injured persons.” [Source]
3. This one is probably our favorite. The study admits that self defense is a common occurrence and happens at least as much violent crimes involving guns. This is a direct busted myth to the anti gun argument that guns are almost never used for self defense.
“Defensive use of guns by crime victims is a common occurrence […]. Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million per year, in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008.” [Source]
4. Furthermore, on self defense, if you carry a gun and fight back against a violent assailant, you are less likely to be killed or harmed than someone who decided to fight back and employ another self defense tactic or weapon.
“Studies that directly assessed the effect of actual defensive uses of guns […] have found consistently lower injury rates among gun-using crime victims compared with victims who used other self-protective strategies.” [Source]
That has to hurt. I’m sure this study, as with most studies that fail to propagate the state’s propaganda, will never buried deep in some hole and never acknowledged again. It’s also likely that several people at the CDC will no longer have jobs as that is often the price of failing to tow the party line. Still, the report is pretty good for gun owners because it shows that even government agencies can’t successfully coverup the fact that guns are useful tools for self-defense.