Do you have a citation for that? I've not heard of this and I follow the issue relatively closely. I also find gun death stats pretty widely available and broken down to pretty small geographical areas from various governmental (not necessarily just federal though) and non-governmental organizations.

I do remember having read that a lot of law enforcement agencies don't collect, or collect in a way that makes it hard to tabulate shootings by officers- but a) I don't have a cite for that, it was a while ago, and b) that's also up to individual enforcement agencies, not federal.

Umm, it's not a secret or obscure law that bars the CDC from studying gun impact:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dickey_Amendment_(1996)

- The Congressman Who Restricted Gun Violence Research Has Regrets: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/jay-dickey-gun-violence-...

- The ban has supposedly been lifted: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/storyline/wp/2015/01/14/...

- Some more history: http://www.apa.org/science/about/psa/2013/02/gun-violence.as...

- some background: http://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-gun-re...

And I love this entry on a blog site (Forbes): Why The Centers For Disease Control Should Not Receive Gun Research Funding: https://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2013/02/12/why-the-ce...

The reasoning? "There was a very good reason for the gun violence research funding ban. Virtually all of the scores of CDC-funded firearms studies conducted since 1985 had reached conclusions favoring stricter gun control. "

The most glaring example is Congress taking away funding from the Centers for Disease Control to study gun violence (I think they still do some reports based on data collected by others but not their own original research). While gun crimes get some attention, particularly mass shootings, accidents and suicides account for most gun deaths and injuries.

There isn't a hypothetical set of statistics you can imagine that would change my moral stance on gun rights and self defense one way or the other.

Interesting. Is that true for all topics, or just guns?

I ask because there are plenty of other such cases. We decide how much to spend on freeway construction and maintenance vs lives saved. We study the dangers, additivity etc of smoking and decide it's better to place some restrictions on people's presumed freedom of choice in order to, ironically, improve their in practice freedom of choice. We restrict the absoluteness of some peoples' freedom of association to improve everyone's freedom of association, using data to determine where this might be appropriate and how much. Etc etc.

What I have said is true regardless if you think the right to bear arms is absolute or if you think it's absolutely abhorrent, much less if your position is in between. Do you believe that science has no bearing on morality of any kind, or only on the topic of guns?

You're probably talking to some libertarian who believes freedom is "doing whatever the fuck I think is best for myself"