Everytown for Gun Safety in America is probably the leading gun control group in the nation right now. That doesn’t make them less ridiculous than the rest; it just means they’re bigger and better funded.
With that funding, they’ve done a lot of things, including so-called research, and now even gun training.
Yeah, really.
However, as Amy Swearer pointed out recently at The Daily Signal, their “facts” aren’t facting.
For years, gun control advocates have clung to a now-tired narrative on the costs and benefits of civilian gun ownership. The narrative paints the Second Amendment as the primary cause of an alleged (and seemingly perpetual) “gun violence epidemic,” while insisting that ordinary civilians rarely rely on firearms for self-defense.
Prominent gun control groups like Everytown routinely weaponize this narrative to lament the very existence of the right to keep and bear arms—and to advocate for increasingly severe restrictions on civilian gun ownership.
There’s just one problem: Gun control advocates’ own data tells a very different story.
Earlier this month, Everytown invited American gun owners to attend the group’s online gun safety training classes, which lectured attendees on the fact that defensive gun uses are an “exceedingly rare” phenomenon. Astute gun owners, however, noticed something peculiar—the numbers simply did not add up.
The lecturers insisted, on the one hand, that the nation suffered from a gun violence epidemic because an average of 47,000 Americans died from gunshot wounds annually over the last five years (at least half of those deaths are suicides). Yet, on the other hand, the training materials stated that those supposedly “rare” defensive gun uses occurred at an average of 69,000 times annually since 2019—making them 22% more “common” than the gun deaths allegedly reaching epidemic levels.
In other words, Everytown inadvertently admitted that Second Amendment advocates have been right all along—ordinary Americans routinely rely on the right to keep and bear arms.
And let’s remember that Everytown undercounts defensive gun uses. Their numbers are lower than pretty much every other estimate out there, and by a significant margin.
On every level, defensive gun uses are more common than this supposed epidemic of violence that is mostly people hurting themselves, anyway.
How is it that defensive gun uses can be rare, but “gun deaths” are so common, when the numbers look like this?
The answer, of course, is that it doesn’t matter. No matter how many defensive gun uses there are, they’re going to make it out like it’s not enough to justify gun rights. If they cited the 2.5 million defensive gun uses we routinely cite, it wouldn’t matter because five people got shot maliciously somewhere in the world. There’s literally no situation where they’ll actually recognize defensive gun uses as being anything other than irrelevant.
Their own numbers show how wrong they are, and their own numbers on defensive gun uses are the ridiculous outlier. How they can say they’re rare with a straight face is one of the great mysteries of our time.
Or it would be if we had any reason to believe anyone but paid actors who didn’t know what they were saying were involved in making that claim in their “training” classes.
Editor’s Note: The radical left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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