Yet the truth of the matter is that Giffords and most of their anti-gun buddies like to ignore reality when they make their push.

For example, they recently released their grades for various states.

NEW GRADES ARE IN… and 21 states are failing at protecting their communities. That’s unacceptable.

Our lawmakers can and must pass lifesaving gun safety laws.https://t.co/zQ03KjruBQ pic.twitter.com/4wExNsTpoH

— GIFFORDS (@GIFFORDS_org) December 18, 2023

Those states in red are “failing to protect their communities.”

Second Amendment attorney Kostas Moros saw this and kind of went off in all the best ways possible.

How do you clowns seriously argue that a state like Idaho, with its 2022 homicide rate of 2.0 per 100,000 people, less than half of what California has, is "failing at protecting [its] communities"? Seems like it is doing a pretty damn good job at keeping people safe overall.… https://t.co/dIAjI8qxYN

— Kostas Moros (@MorosKostas) December 19, 2023

He brings up a good point, and it’s not just Idaho with a low homicide rate being accused of not taking people’s safety seriously.

For example, Giffords compares California to Wyoming and tries to make the case that it’s far less safe, with a “gun death” rate more than twice California’s (8.7 vs 20.6 per 100K residents). That’s an interesting comparison, and likely why Moros compared Idaho to California versus some other state.

But we also know that “gun death” is a conglomeration of literally anyone who dies from a gunshot, even if it’s a suicide.

According to the CDC, Wyoming has the highest suicide mortality rate in the nation. Even if you removed guns from the equation, it would probably still be higher than California’s. That’s because suicide isn’t a gun issue, no matter what Giffords tries to claim.

But Wyoming’s homicide rate in 2021–remember, a pretty violent year across the nation–was nil according to the CDC.

California’s rate was 6.4.

We already know that Idaho and Wyoming are safer states from a homicide perspective, but what other states got an F grade from Giffords yet are actually safer than their benchmark “A” state of California?

Utah got an F from them, but their homicide rate is 2.7, less than half of California’s. Montana’s is 4.4, which is still significantly lower than the Golden State’s. Iowa got a 3.2 and North Dakota got a 3.4.

In other words a number of states with a failing grade by Giffords’ standards have a far lower homicide rate than “A” ranked California.

See, the issue here is that Giffords isn’t really looking at safety. They might think they are, but they’re not. They’re basing their grades entirely off of gun control legislation. Who is pushing anti-gun laws and who isn’t. That’s literally the only criteria they’re using.

Then they use “gun deaths” to try and justify it.

But that’s cherry-picked data that only makes sense if you can’t see that guns can potentially have positive benefits to society. It assumes that there are absolutely no defensive gun uses, for one thing. Gun control laws make it harder for people to use a gun defensively, which can actually skew homicide rates.

After all, the reason some pro-gun states are pro-gun in the first place is because of their violent crime rates. As Moros notes in his post above, the South has very high “gun death” rates, and our homicide rates are high as well, but they were high when we still had extensive gun control laws on the books.

In fact, those rates actually started dropping when those laws were repealed.

Giffords, however, doesn’t care about that. They’ve never cared about it and none of their allies care about it. All they care about is infringing on our right to keep and bear arms, and they’ll use every manipulative technique they can think of to make that happen.

Even ignoring the real problems in some of these states that have nothing at all to do with guns. They care about nothing but firearms and we all know it.