Everytown’s latest “study” claims that states with more guns somehow suffer more gun violence, but the report quietly ignores the most basic economic reality: criminals don’t line up at gun stores with background-check forms when they need a firearm. By treating every legally purchased gun as an equal contributor to crime, the group flips the law of supply and demand on its head—more legal supply doesn’t automatically flood the black market; it simply arms law-abiding citizens who then deter criminals through everyday carry and home defense. The data they wave around collapses once you separate the defensive uses documented by CDC estimates and the National Academies from the tiny fraction of guns that are actually trafficked, revealing a deliberate conflation meant to paint ownership itself as the problem.

What makes the piece especially telling is how it treats shall-issue carry laws and constitutional carry expansions as if they magically create more criminals rather than more deterrents. States that adopted permitless carry after years of shall-issue permitting saw violent crime continue its long-term decline, not spike, precisely because the increased presence of armed citizens raises the risk for anyone contemplating robbery or assault. Everytown’s model never accounts for this substitution effect: when a potential offender knows the next convenience-store clerk or Uber driver might be armed, the expected payoff of crime drops faster than any theoretical increase in gun availability could offset. That omission isn’t an oversight; it’s the only way their narrative survives contact with real-world outcomes in places like Vermont, New Hampshire, and the growing list of constitutional-carry states.

For the 2A community the takeaway is straightforward: every new “public-health” paper that erases defensive gun uses and black-market dynamics is another argument for keeping our own data pipelines open and our legal defenses funded. When groups funded by billionaire gun-control money publish models that treat 120 million law-abiding owners as a risk factor rather than a rights-bearing population, the response isn’t better studies from the same echo chamber—it’s continued litigation, state-level preemption laws, and relentless public education that lawful carry and ownership are the variable that actually moves crime downward.