... the Center [sic] for Disease Control, in
a report ordered by President Obama in 2012 following the Sandy Hook Massacre, estimated that the number of crimes prevented by guns could be even higher—as many as 3 million annually, or some 8,200 every day.
No, it didn't**.
The CDC reported that
others had made that estimation. Other also estimate it could be nearly 30 times lower than that. Here's the relevant part from the CDC's summary on defensive gun use:
Defensive use of guns by crime victims is a common occurrence, although the exact number remains disputed (Cook and Ludwig, 1996; Kleck, 2001a). Almost all national survey estimates indicate that defensive gun uses by victims are at least as common as offensive uses by criminals, with estimates of annual uses ranging from about 500,000 to more than 3 million (Kleck, 2001a), in the context of about 300,000 violent crimes involving firearms in 2008 (BJS, 2010). On the other hand, some scholars point to a radically lower estimate of only 108,000 annual defensive uses based on the National Crime Victimization Survey (Cook et al., 1997). The variation in these numbers remains a controversy in the field. The estimate of 3 million defensive uses per year is based on an extrapolation from a small number of responses taken from more than 19 national surveys. The former estimate of 108,000 is difficult to interpret because respondents were not asked specifically about defensive gun use.
National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. 2013. Priorities for Research to Reduce the Threat of Firearm-Related Violence. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press.
https://doi.org/10.17226/18319.
If guns were so good at preventing crime, surely the most armed Western nation should have the lowest rates of crime...
**I knew this was wrong, because from the mid 1990s onwards, NRA backed politicians successfully blocked the CDC from receiving funding for research on gun violence (starting with the Dickey amendment). The federal budget for such work was below $100,000 per year as of 2013, down from $2.6 million in 1995.
Between 1993 and 2018, CDC research funding on firearms related topics averaged less than $1 million per year. To put that into perspective, federal research funding on motor vehicle accident prevention averaged nearly $450 million per year over the same period and federal funding on research into
homeopathy averaged nearly $6 million per year.