A recent investigation by FiveThirtyEight and The Trace found that the CDC is publishing gun injury data that the agency itself admits is "unstable and potentially unreliable," though the mainstream media seems to have no problem with citing it is "factual."
While various other agencies, organizations, and entities that track such data have procured data showing that gun violence is down in recent years, only the CDC is reporting that it's somehow increasing. This is what's known as an outlier, and for scientific purposes it's typically thrown out as erroneous. But since it matches the leftists' anti-gun narrative, it's often peddled in the fake news as "science."
"... the CDC's report of a steady increase in nonfatal gun injuries is out of step with a downward trend we found using data from multiple independent public health and criminal justice databases," reports FiveThirtyEight. "That casts doubt on the CDC's figures and the narrative suggested by the way those numbers have changed over time."
More than a dozen public health researchers agree: CDC gun injury statistics are fake news
Responding to an analysis memo indicating major problems with the CDC's gun injury data, an agency spokesperson reportedly responded to FiveThirtyEight and The Trace with claims that the CDC is "confident that the sampling and estimation methods are appropriate," even though they're antithetical to every other gun injury dataset out there.
The CDC claims that it merely used data from the Consumer Product Safety Commission that showed a massive increase between 2015 and 2016 of 31,000 gun injuries.
"Although visually, the [CDC] estimates for firearm-related assaults appear to be increasing from 2015 to 2016, there is not a statistically significant difference between the estimates," this same spokesperson added in the agency's official response.
But The Trace and FiveThirtyEight had their analysis looked over by more than a dozen public health researchers, all of whom validated that there are serious problems with the CDC's data that skew an accurate understanding of firearm-associated injuries.
"No one should trust the CDC's nonfatal firearm injury point estimates," says David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center.
More than 50 "academic" papers have cited bunk CDC gun data since 2010
Even so, more than 50 published "academic" articles have cited the CDC's fake gun injury data since 2010, including a paper published last year in the American Journal of Epidemiology that claimed there exists a "hidden epidemic of firearm injury."
"For those of us who are doing this kind of research, it's disconcerting," Priscilla Hunt, a researcher at the non-profit RAND Corporation, is quoted as saying about the great disservice that the CDC is doing to public consciousness as it pertains to guns and the Second Amendment. "With the CDC, there's this general assumption that they are reliable and have good data."
According to FiveThirtyEight, there are more academic experts, scientists, and researchers than you probably think who are coming to the shocking-to-them conclusion that the CDC can't actually be trusted, despite having a reputation as being "official" and "unbiased."
"I don't know when the last time was when someone took a look at the methodology," stated the Linda DeGutis, a former director of the CDC's National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. "A federal agency should be able to compare the data sets that are available to say, 'Wait a minute, why are we seeing these discrepancies?'"
Be sure to read the full FiveThirtyEight report on the CDC's fake gun safety data at this link.
For more news about guns, check out Guns.news.
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