At the request of gun-control activists such as Mark Bryant, founder of the Gun Violence Archive, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention removed its defensive gun-use data in May 2022. Bryant had complained that gun-rights advocates frequently cited the estimates to “stop [gun-control] legislation,” The Trump administration restored the post as it originally appeared before the CDC removed it and has now corrected an error in the original version. This was the CDC’s original post.
The 60,000 estimate is from an earlier NCVS. The problem is that 2013 National Academies of Sciences (NAS) report warns the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) estimates are “difficult to interpret because respondents were not asked specifically about defensive gun use.” The report noted that estimates from national surveys as cited by Kleck ranged from about 500,000 to more than 3 million defensive gun uses per year.
The CDC has now corrected the information that had been posted and eliminated the lower estimate of defensive gun uses that the NAS report had noted was problematic..The NAS report didn’t make it clear that the 500,000 number was just for handguns, and the top estimate from the NAS report was 3.7 million. But this is a big improvement over what had originally been put up at the CDC website.
— CRPC in The CDC Corrects its Post on Defensive Gun Uses