Lies, Damn Lies, & “Everytown For Gun Safety”

You’d think the gun-grabbers would be ashamed to say these things … but if they had any shame, they wouldn’t be gun-grabbers, would they?

A new “study” by Everytown for Gun Safety which claims that 298,000 lives could be saved if all states adopted strict gun control policies like California is “misleading at best,” the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms said in reaction. We’ll get to the CCRKBA analysis in a moment, but first, the most important thing to know about Everytown’s claim.

Three hundred thousand? When and how? One has to dig deep into the news coverage to find out that they mean this is meant to happen over 10 years. That’s 30,000 a year … which happens to correlate pretty neatly to the average number of yearly deaths by gun in America. (That figure includes suicides, accidents, justifiable homicides–as in armed citizen incidents and police shootings–and homicides. The suicide portion is generally just over 50% year to year.)

That means that Everytown is claiming that, should all 50 states adopt California-style gun control, nobody will ever die from a firearm injury ever again. This goes beyond lies, and into delusion.

And, as CCRKBA points out, one can take the Everytown list of states with tough gun laws and correlate it 100% with the states that are experiencing tremendous leaps in their murder rates.

“While Everytown says California is the top state for so-called ‘gun safety policies,’ the homicide body count tells a different story,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb. “Based on 2022 data, the most recent year for which statistics are available, California reported the most murders of any state in the nation. In second and third place for this year are New York and Illinois, which simply defies logic.

“One of the signals this is bogus research is the way Everytown graded Washington State, where the Citizens Committee is headquartered,” he continued. “Washington is position ninth on the list, and is described as ‘making progress.’ The state has adopted increasingly restrictive gun laws in recent years, and the number of homicides has more than doubled since 2014, according to FBI data and statistics from the Washington Association of Sheriffs and Police Chiefs. Seattle just set a new homicide record in 2023. If that’s what Everytown calls ‘making progress,’ we would be better off going back to living in caves.

“The only conclusion one can draw is that Everytown is far more interested in restricting the rights of honest citizens than it is in reducing violent crime or taking violent criminals off the street,” he added.

CNN reported the Everytown study “as though it were gospel,” Gottlieb observed. He said this is just another example of media bias “willing to accept anything from gun control groups without the least bit of skepticism.”

“If the Citizens Committee ever released a report on the benefits of concealed carry,” Gottlieb stated, “you can bet the media would dissect every syllable just to see if they could dismiss the data as unbelievable.”