Members of Congress August Pfluger and Elise Stefanik said they have never been more skeptical of the CDC.
After eliminating statistics on defensive gun usage from its website at the request of gun control proponents, Republican legislators are now requesting that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) restore the information.
Fox News Digital has received a copy of a letter issued to CDC director Rochelle Walensky on Monday by Representatives August Pfluger (R-Texas) and Elise Stefanik (R-New York) asking for an explanation for the agency’s decision to scrub the data. After a series of meetings in 2021 with gun control proponents, the CDC erased references to research it had commissioned.
“There is a historic low in the public’s confidence in the CDC at this point. It has now come to light that the self-proclaimed “non-partisan agency” has censored data that gun control advocates found objectionable. As many as 2.5 million Americans used their firearms in the previous year for self-defense, according to research conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). To prevent this kind of activity, Congress must take action and establish safeguards, “Pfluger stated in a statement for Fox News Digital.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) “must immediately halt their obvious politicization of the facts in support of the Far Left anti-gun agenda,” Stefanik stated in another statement to Fox. Law-abiding folks exercise their Second Amendment rights to protect their families and communities, but the Biden administration is dishonestly telling the American people otherwise.
The letter also asks the CDC to explain its decision to delete the data and how it intends to provide reliable statistics on Americans’ usage of defensive firearms in the future.
Fox News Digital requested comment from the CDC but did not receive a reply right away.
Gary Kleck, an emeritus professor at Florida State University and the author of research commissioned by the CDC, concluded that between 60,000 and 2.5 million people in the United States use firearms for self-defense each year.
Executive director of the pro-gun-control Gun Violence Archive Mark Bryant emailed and spoke with CDC officials, telling them that the data needed to be “dead, buried, dug out, killed again, and buried again.”
Officials at the CDC initially denied his request but later conceded and took the report down from their website.
Pfluger and Stefanik claim that the CDC’s handling of the SARS and COVID-19 pandemics has further eroded the organization’s already-low trust among Americans.
“Public distrust in government institutions is at an all-time low, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) decision to conceal public health data at the request of gun control supporters will only serve to deepen that cynicism. The CDC’s withholding of research it commissioned suggests it is trying to evade the authority Congress has granted it “in the letter the two of them penned. As one critic put it, “this restriction panders to the activist organizations that strive to hide up the truth that much of the weapon business succeeds because customers demand the freedom to protect their life, liberty, and property.”