How This Anti-Gun Group is Trying to Mislead the Masses

July 4, 2026
12:31 am

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Everytown’s latest campaign leans on cherry-picked statistics that lump defensive gun uses together with every conceivable firearm-related incident, creating the illusion that guns are almost never used to stop crime. By spotlighting raw body counts while ignoring the 500,000 to 3 million defensive uses estimated each year by CDC-affiliated researchers and the National Academies, the group paints a one-sided picture that collapses the moment you ask how many of those “gun deaths” were actually criminals shot by armed citizens. The sleight of hand works because most readers never see the denominator: millions of peaceful carry permit holders whose firearms remain holstered precisely because criminals calculate the risk of encountering an armed defender. This tactic isn’t new, but its timing is instructive. As permitless-carry laws expand and more states adopt constitutional carry, Everytown needs a narrative that keeps suburban voters nervous enough to accept new restrictions. The strategy hinges on emotional imagery—press conferences flanked by grieving families—while quietly omitting that the same cities posting the highest homicide totals also post the strictest gun laws, a correlation the group never wants examined. When the data are finally disaggregated, the story flips: shall-issue and constitutional-carry jurisdictions have seen either flat or declining violent-crime trends, undercutting the claim that more guns automatically equals more bodies. For the 2A community the takeaway is straightforward: messaging discipline matters as much as legislation. Every time an anti-gun press release drops, grassroots communicators must immediately re-center the discussion on the millions of lawful, quiet successes rather than letting the debate default to the fraction of a percent of gun owners who commit crimes. If the public begins to internalize that defensive gun uses are routine rather than rare, the entire architecture of “public-health” style gun control loses its emotional leverage, and that is exactly why groups like Everytown work so hard to keep those numbers out of the frame.

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This tactic isn’t new, but its timing is instructive. As permitless-carry laws expand and more states adopt constitutional carry, Everytown needs a narrative that keeps suburban voters nervous enough to accept new restrictions. The strategy hinges on emotional imagery—press conferences flanked by grieving families—while quietly omitting that the same cities posting the highest homicide totals also post the strictest gun laws, a correlation the group never wants examined. When the data are finally disaggregated, the story flips: shall-issue and constitutional-carry jurisdictions have seen either flat or declining violent-crime trends, undercutting the claim that more guns automatically equals more bodies.

For the 2A community the takeaway is straightforward: messaging discipline matters as much as legislation. Every time an anti-gun press release drops, grassroots communicators must immediately re-center the discussion on the millions of lawful, quiet successes rather than letting the debate default to the fraction of a percent of gun owners who commit crimes. If the public begins to internalize that defensive gun uses are routine rather than rare, the entire architecture of “public-health” style gun control loses its emotional leverage, and that is exactly why groups like Everytown work so hard to keep those numbers out of the frame.

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