William Kirk of Washington Gun Law opened this one by admitting what most of us were thinking: “We don’t have the intestinal fortitude to sit through Everytown’s new gun training program.”
Luckily, Lee Williams — the Gun Writer himself and chief editor of the Second Amendment Foundation’s Investigative Journalism Project — took the hit for the team.
Williams, a former cop, veteran, and lifelong instructor, signed up for Everytown’s $20 “Smart Guide to Buying a Gun” course to see what the other side was teaching. Spoiler alert: it wasn’t much.
“It was the worst instruction I’ve ever seen,” Williams said. “The production quality was great, but the instruction? Not any second place.”
Instead of any live-fire lessons, range drills, or basic gun-handling demos, students were told not to have firearms anywhere nearby. The instructors — or, as Williams put it, “kids reading scripts” — delivered canned lines with zero credentials listed.
No law enforcement, no NRA certs, no competition backgrounds. Just personal anecdotes like, “I grew up with guns.”
The so-called “Smart Guide” turned out to be anything but. “It was basically ‘Don’t buy a gun,’” Williams joked. “If you do, take it apart, lock it up, hide the clips and the ammo.”
He said Everytown’s messaging was less about training and more about indoctrination — convincing new shooters that ownership itself is risky, irresponsible, or downright immoral.
The claims shared during the course didn’t hold up, either.
One slide warned that owning a gun “doubles your chances of dying by homicide,” and another claimed that firearms in domestic situations make women “five times more likely to be killed.”
Williams called the stats “complete bunk.”
“They don’t want you to have a gun for self-defense,” he said. “They actually suggested getting a dog instead.”
Even the basic four rules of firearm safety — credited for decades to Col. Jeff Cooper — were repackaged without acknowledgment. Everytown simply presented them as its own invention.
“They didn’t mention Cooper, the NRA, or anyone,” Williams said. “They acted like they came up with them last week.”
In the end, Williams summed it up perfectly: Everytown isn’t teaching gun safety — it’s selling fear, dressed up as education.
And while Kirk might not have the stomach for it, he was right about one thing: sometimes the best lesson about “gun safety” comes from watching what not to do.
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