Newly discovered statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which were allegedly "never publicly released," dismantle the liberal gun control narrative that firearms are not regularly used in self-defense.

What do the statistics show?

As Reason noted, the CDC is legally unable to study gun control. However, in the 1990s, the federal agency sought to learn how many Americans use firearms in defense situations on an annual basis. They apparently just never told anyone about it. Still, what they found confirmed what Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck learned on the issue in the 1990s.

Kleck has maintained through the years that firearms are used nearly one million times each year in self-defense. He and research partner Marc Gertz have routinely suggested that number is closer to 2 million, though it has proved difficult to confirm their suspicions.

However, Kleck recently unearthed the "lost" CDC study, which confirmed his suspicions. Indeed, the CDC study, which the federal agency conducted from 1996 to 1998, found there are 2.46 million defensive gun uses in the U.S. each year.

In a new academic paper — titled, "What Do CDC’s Surveys Say About the Frequency of Defensive Gun Uses?" — Kleck commented that the CDC's survey was "high-quality" and asked the DGU question to a sample size of more than 5,000 adults.

Still, Kleck was disappointed the CDC's DGU question was only asked to respondents who reported having a gun in their home. Because just 79 percent of respondents who reported a DGU owned a firearm in their home, Kleck believes the CDC's statistics need to be adjusted upward.

If the statistics are adjusted correctly, they will prove firearms are used more often in self-defense situations than they are used in violent crime, Kleck says.

"[The]CDC's results, then, imply that guns were used defensively by victims about 3.6 times as often as they were used offensively by criminals," he writes.

Meanwhile, the mainstream media continues to push the claim that there are only about 100,000 DGUs annually.