Everytown for Gun Safety in America is, without a doubt, one of the leading gun control organizations in the country. Sure, they have “gun safety” in their name, but we’ve all known since the start that the group was about gun control and little else.
They might talk about safety in the abstract, but that’s not what they or their membership was about.
Over the last month or two, the organization has hit a few speed bumps. Maybe not as many as March For Our Lives has, but enough.
For example, they’re dealing with the fallout from their endorsement of Virginia Attorney General candidate Jay Jones, who they endorsed and donated a ton of money to, only to find out that he’s really comfortable with violence against his opponents. They scrubbed Jones from their list of endorsements, but they’ve been otherwise pretending they had nothing to do with the man from the start.
And no one on this side of the gun debate is willing to let that slide.
I mean, how can you claim to be about gun safety and then just look the other way when a candidate you endorsed said he’d shoot a rival over Pol Pot and Hitler, then said he’d like to see that rival’s children be killed just so the father would change his opinion on some policies. That’s unhinged thinking, if you can even call it that, and it’s suggestive of someone who would cross the line with just the slightest push, and they’re saying nothing at all.
It wouldn’t take much. Brady actually said they wouldn’t condone such language, which is all Everytown would need to say, and they’ve refused to do so.
Then we have their gun training.
Yeah, if you haven’t heard, Everytown for Gun Safety has decided to offer its own gun training course, and the internal blow-up over it is enlightening, to say the least.
At first glance, Train SMART may seem like a pragmatic move in a country with more than 400 million firearms distributed (unevenly) among roughly 30 percent of adults. Maybe, the thinking goes, if gun ownership isn’t going away, the next best thing is to make it safer. For decades, hard-line “gun rights” organizations have dominated many large-scale training offerings, increasingly promoting an absolutist, deregulated vision of gun ownership while largely ignoring vital principles of safety and suicide prevention. By contrast, Train SMART’s marketing emphasizes exercises on de-escalation and secure storage, topics particularly important for gun owners who are interested in self- and family defense.
But for many of Everytown’s original supporters, especially survivors of gun violence, this move feels like a profound betrayal. Train SMART represents a major shift in focus at Everytown, founded in 2013 following the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut. Originally, the organization defined itself by a simple, evidence-based premise: Fewer guns in fewer hands means fewer deaths. Through its grassroots partners in its two major subsidiary groups, Moms Demand Action and Students Demand Action, Everytown built a massive movement grounded in public grief, unyielding advocacy, and public health–centered research. It quickly became the largest, most highly resourced organization in the effort to reduce gun violence. Its expanding network of volunteers—most of them parents, educators, and survivors—showed up in state houses and school board meetings across the country, advocating for commonsense firearm regulations designed to save lives. These voices insisted that our gun-violence epidemic could not be solved with more guns. Now these same supporters are watching the movement’s flagship organization enter the gun training business.
Of course, by losing their minds like this, not only is Everytown having to deal with dissension in the ranks, criticism from outside sources over the Jones endorsement, but these folks are telling on themselves.
Proper training is a key factor in reducing accidental shootings, which is something that should exist well within Everytown’s wheelhouse. None of us is interested in their training, obviously, except to make fun of it, but not everyone is a pro-gun advocate. They might be more comfortable with Everytown than the NRA.
And if anti-gunners are to be believed, they don’t want to ban guns; they just want safety. They want to address violent crime.
But they’re losing their minds over their organization actually taking a step that at least looks like they’re serious about gun safety rather than gun control. What that tells us is that, for most of them, the term “gun safety” really is just a euphemism for gun control. They don’t care about responsible gun ownership. They don’t want to help facilitate responsible gun ownership.
They just want to curtail gun ownership, and now they’re pissed because the gun control group they joined is trying to look like it wants to live up to its name.
It’s all you really need to know.
So, from September to today, Everytown has had probably the worst month and a half of its existence, and honestly, I find it hilarious.
They spent so long up on their high horse that now they’ve got a long way to fall. They’ve pretended to be the moral ones in this debate, lashing out at people who disagree with them as folks who want mass shootings and dead children, but didn’t want to ban guns, and now the truth has come out across the board.
It’s hilarious.
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