In a recent paper, Florida State criminologist Gary Kleck exposed some interesting information about the Centers for Disease Control’s research into gun violence – research conducted in 1996, 1997, and 1998 and never released or acknowledged. One has to wonder why, when the CDC found defensive gun uses important enough to include a question in national surveys, they would exclude the results of that data in their research.

I’ll tell you why.

Because the CDC, a government agency, has been patently dishonest about the findings of its gun violence research because the results did not support a predetermined agenda. According to Kleck, who obtained the CDC’s data and compared it with his own research that showed that an average of 2.46 million adults in the US had used a gun for self-defense in each of the years from 1996 through 1998.

Care to guess how many defensive gun uses Kleck’s research showed took place in 1992? That’s right – 2.5 million per year.

In other words, the CDC lied by omission, probably to salvage its funding, and Kleck’s hypothesis about the reasons the CDC suppressed the results of its research match mine.

One obvious explanation would be that they recognized that their own surveys’ finding of a high DGU prevalence was unfriendly to gun control efforts – efforts repeatedly endorsed by CDC-financed researchers (Kates 2001). Such a decision could have been made at the level of administrators who supervise the BRFSS, or perhaps just lower-level personnel who understood that these findings would be unwelcome news to their bosses. Regardless of how the decision was made, it was a disservice to the American people, who paid for the survey and the information it yielded, but who were not allowed to see it and judge its worth for themselves.

This is why we don’t trust freedom-eroding cowards who claim they have our best interests at heart when they attempt to implement some common sense gun control relieve us of our rights.

Much like the CDC, they cite faulty studies, tell outright lies, and misrepresent evidence in order to achieve their disarmament goals. And they’ve been doing it for years under the guise of “safety.”

For years, the gun grabbers have claimed that no one wants to take away our guns. They lie.

For years, they have been citing alleged “evidence” from researcher Arthur Kellermann claiming that a gun in the home is 43 times more likely to kill a friend or a loved one than an intruder. They lie.

Gun grabbers claim that the Dickey Amendment prevents the CDC from conducting research on gun violence and blame Republicans for preventing critical research they claim will surely prove that gun control is needed to reduce an “epidemic.” They lie. What the Dickey Amendment does do is prevent the CDC from using public funds to advocate for the infringement of Americans’ constitutional rights – research that is biased or outright concealed if it does not match the politicians’ preconceived notion – precisely what the CDC did in 1996-1998 when they buried the results of the survey that showed millions of people in the US used a gun to defend themselves and their property.

Here’s a clue, gun grabbers: if you want to have an honest conversation about gun violence and ways to reduce it, you need to stop lying.

You need to stop lying about the “epidemic” of gun violence. There is no epidemic, and homicides committed with firearms have been on the decline – even in gang war zones like Chicago.

You need to stop lying about defensive gun uses. Gary Kleck, who has been vilified by gun grabbers for years, unearthed CDC omissions about their research that vindicates his 1995 study.

You need to stop lying about school shootings and citing doctored data by obviously biased organizations to support your agenda.

You need to stop accusing those of us who cherish our rights and our freedoms of loving our guns more than children and of having blood on our hands. I guarantee you we love our kids, and we show it by teaching them to protect themselves, to use tools of self defense responsibly, and to defend their rights from infringement by opportunistic politicians.

You need to stop arguing in bad faith, hurling vile accusations at those who disagree with your agenda, and trying to destroy the lives and livelihoods of those who don’t toe your ideological red line.

And you need to stop discounting defensive gun uses. They are real. They exist. And even if you don’t believe Kleck’s study and the CDC’s numbers that indicate between 2.2 and 2.5 million people use guns defensively every year, 100,000 is still a significant number, which gun grabbers Philip Cook and well-known biased gun “researcher” David Hemenway claim is more “realistic” than Kleck’s (and now CDC’s) findings – more significant than the 30,000 killed by firearms, two-thirds of which are suicides.

If you want an honest conversation about violence, it can’t just be hysterical screeching about “common sense gun control.” The root causes of violence – things you don’t like talking about, such as broken families, lack of education, and drugs – have to be a sincere part of the conversation.

But since you insist on hysterically spreading misinformation and outright lies and working to silence and intimidate those who don’t subscribe to your little bit of ignorant tyranny, you can count on a middle finger in your general direction.

We don’t believe you. Your record doesn’t warrant it.