The Biden administration, for example, recently put a ban on the importation of Russian ammo, which was not only keeping ammo prices down but also represented a significant bulk of rifle ammo that is sold. Those are the kinds of moves to look for. If you can’t get or afford ammo, then what’s a gun worth?

Of course, anyone familiar with issues related to gun ownership understands that gun control measures favored by people like Walensky and others would do almost nothing to curb gun violence. One of the factors they typically leave out is the fact that the vast majority of gun homicides are committed using firearms obtained illegally. Indeed, a study conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics reported that less than two percent of prisoners surveyed obtained their weapons legally.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that making it more difficult for responsible Americans to own firearms only makes people less safe. But there is another aspect at work here: the number of defensive gun uses that occur each year. It has been shown that there are far more instances in which an individual uses a gun to defend themselves than situations in which a criminal uses a weapon offensively.

In fact, what is remarkable about this is that the CDC’s own data shows that a gun is more likely to be used defensively than to commit a crime like robbery, homicide, etc. In a study that the agency never made public, researchers found that there were almost 2.5 million defensive uses of guns annually. The study, which was conducted in the 1990s, mirrored results found by Florida State University criminologist Gary Kleck.

The criminologist explained how the CDC’s findings were similar to his:

The final adjusted prevalence of 1.24% therefore implies that in an average year during 1996–1998, 2.46 million U.S. adults used a gun for self-defense. This estimate, based on an enormous sample of 12,870 cases (unweighted) in a nationally representative sample, strongly confirms the 2.5 million past-12-months estimate obtained Kleck and Gertz (1995)….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.

Kleck also noted:

CDC never reported the results of those surveys, does not report on their website any estimates of DGU frequency, and does not even acknowledge that they ever asked about the topic in any of their surveys.

So, why would the CDC hide this information from the public? The answer is obvious: They know their stance against private gun ownership doesn’t hold even a shot glass full of water. They understand fully the reality that the anti-gun measures they champion won’t save nearly as many lives as allowing responsible Americans to own firearms. Prohibiting people from carrying guns has a much higher death toll than allowing them to possess the means by which they can defend themselves.

But this begs another question: If these people know they can’t stop gun violence with more laws and that allowing gun ownership saves lives, why are they still pushing to disarm the public?

Without going full tinfoil hat, it is hard to ignore the possibility that people like Walensky want to disarm the populace as much as possible, because it would grant the government more control. Moreover, it would also make people more reliant on the government to take care of them. If one is unarmed and gets into a dangerous situation, they are forced to depend on the police to help them.

We all know how that goes.

Police tend to arrive after the deed has already been done. Unless we can develop a pre-crime system a la “The Minority Report,” placing our full trust in the police is not a winning strategy.

Regardless of their motivations, I think it is safe to draw at least one conclusion: Those promoting further gun restrictions are not concerned with saving lives.