The CDC Buried This Self Defense Gun Data in 2022 and Trump Brought It Back

Gun control activist Mark Bryant demanded in 2022 that the CDC bury its self-defense gun statistics.

A new Georgetown survey of over 50,000 Americans just brought those numbers roaring back.

The results confirm exactly what Democrats spent years trying to make disappear.

New Georgetown Survey of 51000 Americans Confirms Defensive Gun Use Numbers

William English at Georgetown University didn't rely on a hunch or a talking point.

He surveyed 51,398 Americans in July and August of 2026.

The finding should stop every anti-gun politician in Washington cold.

Georgetown's numbers land hard – better than one in three gun owners, 33.1 million people, have already pulled a firearm to protect themselves, their kids, or their home.

In 76.3 percent of those cases, the gun owner never pulled the trigger.

Most of these incidents – three out of four – didn't happen in a living room. They happened on the street, in a parking lot, at a gas station.

In just over half of these cases, it wasn't one attacker. It was a group.

Picture a mom walking to her car at night when two men close in on her.

She doesn't need to pull the trigger – she needs the gun in her hand.

English also found that the number of licensed concealed carriers in America now tops 33 million.

That's not a fringe hobby – that's tens of millions of your neighbors making a choice to protect themselves.

Democrats in Congress have spent the last several years pushing bills to make that choice harder, not easier.

Every one of those bills assumes the gun in that mother's hand is the problem instead of the solution.

How the CDC Buried Defensive Gun Use Statistics Back in 2022

This isn't the first time Americans have seen numbers like these.

A 2013 National Academies of Sciences report put annual defensive gun uses somewhere between 64,000 and 3.5 million.

The CDC settled on an upper estimate of 2.5 million and posted it publicly for years.

Then in 2022, gun control activists went to work behind the scenes.

Bryant, who runs the Gun Violence Archive, emailed CDC officials that the 2.5 million figure "needs to be killed, buried, dug up, killed again and buried again."

The pressure campaign ran through meetings tied to the White House and Senator Dick Durbin's office.

Weeks later, the CDC quietly scrubbed the defensive gun use numbers from its website.

Millions of legal gun owners lost their best piece of evidence overnight.

By August of 2026, the numbers Bryant tried to kill were back on the CDC's own site, National Academies link included, reinstated under the Trump administration.

Researcher John Lott points out that only about one in twenty defensive gun uses ever involves pulling the trigger – the rest is a homeowner brandishing a firearm, which never makes it into a police report or a headline.

The Crime Prevention Research Center found defensive gun uses outnumbered criminal firearm victimizations by more than five to one in 2021, using 1.67 million defensive uses against roughly 330,000 violent firearm crimes.

What 33 Million Defensive Gun Uses Means for the Gun Control Debate

Durbin and Bryant didn't try to bury this data because it was wrong.

They buried it because it destroyed their entire argument.

Every gun control bill in Congress starts from the premise that firearms make Americans less safe.

Thirty-three million defensive gun uses says the opposite, and no amount of scrubbing a government website changes that.

This is the same playbook Democrats ran on crime statistics, on border numbers, and on inflation data for years – hide the number, control the narrative.

It didn't work then, and a Georgetown professor with 51,398 survey responses just made sure it won't work now.

Expect Everytown and its allies to attack English's methodology within days, because attacking the man is easier than facing the math.

Watch for Senate Democrats to reintroduce their assault weapons ban this fall while pretending this survey doesn't exist.

Thirty-three million Americans with a story to tell are a lot harder to bury than a webpage.

Sources:

• AWR Hawkins, "Survey: Over 1/3 of Gun Owners Have Used a Firearm in Self-Defense," Breitbart, September 1, 2026.
• John R. Lott Jr., "The Trump Administration Restores the Gun-Defense Data the Biden CDC Buried," Townhall, August 29, 2026.
• Crime Prevention Research Center, "Defensive Gun Uses Occur About Five Times More Often Than Criminals Use Gun in Crime," May 2026.
• The Trace, "Inflated Claim About Guns and Self-Defense Returns to CDC Website," 2026.