The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has quietly restored data on defensive gun use to its website, four years after deleting it under pressure from gun-control advocacy groups. The restoration lands just as briefing opens at the United States Supreme Court in two consolidated Second Amendment cases, Grant v. Higgins out of the Second Circuit and Viramontes v. Cook County out of the Seventh Circuit, both asking whether states and localities may ban the AR-15 and similar semi-automatic rifles. I do not think the timing is a coincidence, and I do not need to prove that it is one. What matters is what the CDC just handed litigants: an admission against its own prior institutional interest.
What Actually Happened in 2022
For years the CDC’s page on firearm injury and death cited the National Academies of Sciences’ 2013 report, itself commissioned by the CDC, which reviewed the existing research and reported a range of roughly 60,000 to 2.5 million defensive gun uses annually in the United States. That range traces back in part to Gary Kleck’s 1993 household survey. In May 2022, the agency deleted the estimate and the link to the underlying report.
FOIA-obtained emails later showed why. Mark Bryant of Gun Violence Archive told the CDC that the 2.5 million figure “needs to be killed, buried, dug up, killed again, and buried again.” Beth Reimels, then the CDC’s Associate Director for Policy, Partnerships, and Strategic Communication, wrote to Bryant, Devin Hughes of GVPedia, and Po Murray of the Newtown Action Alliance that the agency would “make some edits to the content we discussed that I think will address the concerns you and other partners have raised.” The edits followed. The data disappeared from a federal government website not because new research undercut it, but because advocacy groups asked and the agency complied.
An Admission Against Interest
Senator Chuck Grassley of Iowa, joined by Senators Tom Cotton, Marsha Blackburn, Joni Ernst, and Bill Cassidy, wrote to then-CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky in December 2022 to say so directly:
“The removal of the reference study was not due to updated research. Instead, based on the released emails from the FOIA request, the removal of the study appears only to have been done to appease gun control groups and to suppress any data that firearms are in fact an essential life-saving and protection tool.”
That letter matters now for a reason that goes beyond politics. In litigation, an admission against interest carries weight precisely because no one has an incentive to make it up. A private survey funded by a gun-rights organization is evidence a court must weigh against the source. A federal public-health agency restoring, on its own initiative, data it once suppressed under lobbying pressure is a different category of proof. It is the government conceding, in effect, that the numbers it tried to bury were sound all along.
That distinction matters most in exactly the litigation now pending. Under the framework the Supreme Court has built for Second Amendment cases, the government bears the burden of justifying a ban on a weapon in common use, and the record on why Americans own that weapon is part of what a court weighs. A government website conceding that firearms are used defensively as often as 2.5 million times a year, restored after the agency itself tried to make that fact disappear, is not academic input to that record. It is the defendant’s own file working against the defendant’s own position.
The Stakes Now Sitting at the Supreme Court
Briefs in Grant v. Higgins and Viramontes v. Cook County are due at the Court over the coming weeks. Both cases ask the same underlying question: whether the Second and Fourteenth Amendments protect the right to possess AR-15-platform rifles and similar semi-automatic firearms, the most popular rifle in America. I expect one or more of the parties, or the amici supporting them, to cite the restored CDC data, and I would not be surprised if the Trump administration’s Department of Justice does the same in whatever brief it files in support of the Second Amendment.
I have no inside information that the restoration was timed to this briefing schedule. But the CDC did not need to act now, on data it had suppressed for four years, unless someone decided the moment mattered. Either way, the effect is the same. Information the federal government tried to hide because it was inconvenient to a gun-control narrative is back where it belongs, on the record, for a Court about to decide whether tens of millions of Americans may keep the rifles they use, among other things, to defend themselves.
The point of an armed citizenry, as Joseph Story and St. George Tucker both understood it, was never confined to stopping a tyrannical government. It is the ordinary fact that armed people deter ordinary predators, which is precisely what the CDC spent four years trying not to say.
This article is based on analysis by Professor Mark W. Smith, constitutional attorney and Host of the Four Boxes Diner 2nd Amendment channel. Watch the original video here. This does not constitute legal advice.