The Smoking Gun’s latest so-called “investigation” into crime guns and Everytown’s favorite talking points lands with all the impact of a cap gun in a hurricane. Once again we’re treated to the familiar narrative that America’s gun problem is somehow the fault of legal firearm owners and the shops that serve them, while conveniently ignoring the actual machinery of illegal trafficking: straw buyers, corrupt cops, gang networks, and revolving-door prosecutors who treat armed career criminals like wayward youth. The report leans heavily on Everytown’s curated statistics, the same outfit that treats every defensive gun use as a public health failure and every background check loophole as an existential threat to democracy. Yet somehow the thousands of guns trafficked across the southern border by cartels or the steady flow of stolen firearms from cities with the strictest gun laws in the nation never seem to make the final cut of their outrage.
What makes this latest installment particularly galling is how it attempts to launder Everytown’s policy preferences as neutral journalism. The organization has spent years and millions pushing everything from national licensing to magazine bans to ERPO laws that strip due process, all while pretending their “research” is simply following the data. The data, of course, shows that the vast majority of firearms used in crimes are never legally purchased by the people pulling the trigger. They’re stolen, straw-purchased, or smuggled. But acknowledging that reality would require admitting that the war on guns is really a war on the law-abiding, and that the communities suffering most from gun violence are the ones where police have been demonized, courts have been neutered, and personal responsibility has been replaced by grievance theater.
For the 2A community this is yet another reminder that facts and persistence still matter more than billionaire-funded press releases. Every time these reports drop, they provide another opportunity to highlight the disconnect between elite gun-control mythology and the streets where violent recidivists cycle through the system untouched. The right to keep and bear arms was never promised to be convenient or popular with Manhattan foundations; it exists precisely because governments and well-funded advocacy machines cannot be trusted with a monopoly on force. The Smoking Gun can keep churning out these glossy indictments of the firearms industry. Law-abiding Americans will keep exercising their rights, training, voting, and refusing to accept collective punishment for the failures of a criminal justice system that Everytown’s allies have spent decades weakening. The contrast has never been clearer.
