Everytown has a lot of nerve after NSSF gun lock stunt :: 03/18/2023

There are a lot of gun control groups out there, and Everytown for Gun Safety in America may be one of the most stupidly named in the nation. Not every town supports their blatantly un-American agenda, for one thing.

Yet the group, one that falls under the Bloomberg umbrella, is currently getting a bit of heat over something we reported last week. In particular, slapping their child safety program Be Smart’s cards on NSSF’s Project Childsafe gun locks.

Well, we’ve got some follow-up on that.

For one thing, it seems that the locks were shipped with a note saying certain groups were prohibited from handing out the locks.

There is no mention of the Project Childsafe gun locks that they obtained under false pretenses. They can be seen in the bottom photo at the far left as well as on the right side of the table. Thanks to a note from Holly Sullivan of the Connecticut Civil Defense League, I found out that the box in which these locks are shipped specifically states that Everytown and Moms Demand Action are unauthorized groups.

So they obtained the locks by essentially lying in order to get them, then ignored a note that also specifically says these groups aren’t authorized to hand these out.

Shady as all get out if you ask me.

And yet, Everytown Research is attacking the NSSF as the gun industry’s “power broker.”

Most of it is exactly what you’d expect to see from Everytown. However, here’s the part that was quoted in a tweet that’s been getting them dragged.

At the same time, the NSSF has also published misleading statistics that downplay the dangers of firearms. NSSF studies claim that hunting with a firearm poses nearly the same risk of injury to children as playing pool, and is somehow safer than bowling,⁶⁶ while ignoring the fact that 2,281 children died from guns in 2020 alone.⁶⁷ Similarly, the SSSF website claims that the “shooting sports are one of the safest activities available to youth today!” and directs viewers to the NSSF’s statistics,⁶⁸ which focus on the rate of injury but withhold the severity. There is no mention of how often gunshot wounds lead to death or a severe disability compared to, say, spraining an ankle while playing soccer.

First, let’s focus on the bolded section.

Now, this is Everytown’s research arm. They’re supposed to, at least in theory, understand data. So they should understand that both of these bits of information can be true.

Hunting accidents, while terrifying, are actually incredibly rare.

No one, though, not even Everytown, is claiming that even a significant portion of those 2,200+ “children” were killed while hunting. As such, the two things can both be true at the same time without actually conflicting.

Now, why did I put the world “children” in quotes there? More on that in a second.

The NSSF uses a few different sources for its data. For the table of sports injuries that the NSSF uses in its “Firearm-Related Accident Statistics” report, shown below,⁶⁹ the organization pulls data from the National Safety Council (NSC), which warns that “[b]ecause the list of sports is not complete, and the frequency and duration of participation is unknown, no inference should be made concerning the relative safety of these sports and recreational activities.”⁷⁰ More importantly, the NSC no longer includes hunting data in its list of activities. For that, the NSSF includes data from the U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission on “injury data for Tree Stands,” or how often someone falls from a hunting platform positioned in a tree,⁷¹ and the International Hunter Education Association (IHEA), which has received NSSF funding,⁷² including a grant to maintain the organization’s “Hunter Incident Clearinghouse.”⁷³ Thus, the NSSF isn’t transparent in how the data supports its claim that hunting with firearms is less dangerous than bowling.

OK, so they have criticisms of where the NSSF’s data comes from. Yet at no point do they actually claim it’s false. At best, it’s misleading, but it’s not necessarily inaccurate.

Everytown can’t say the same for its own numbers, though.

Remember those more than 2,200 “children” above? Yeah, Evertown fails to note that those numbers include 18- and 19-year-olds. Those are no more children than my left foot is a battleship. They make up the lion’s share of those fatalities, and many of them were associated with gangs or other criminal activity. Not all of them, mind you, but many. Others simply ran afoul of people like that.

Yet they’re not remotely children by any conventional definition you want to use unless you’re trying to make a political point.

After all, these are the same age categories that make up a large chunk of our military. Is Everytown implying that the United States uses child soldiers?

Yes, the NSSF used a couple of different sources to compile its information, and it’s a fair cop that the data they used doesn’t include the severity of the injuries–not all injuries are created equal, after all–but it’s a little disingenuous for Everytown to act all high and mighty when they’re using data that’s willfully misleading.

Then again, Everytown doesn’t care about the truth, only their agenda.

https://bearingarms.com/tomknighton/2023/03/14/everytown-nssf-n68384