Gun control group 97Percent likes to bill itself as something of a middle ground, in a way. They claim that most gun owners favor at least some degree of gun control and that they exist to support those individuals. They claim they're different from other gun control groups.
They're not, of course, and we've seen evidence of that in the past.
Still, they keep up that claim and the media doesn't question it, especially when 97Percent presents something convenient to the anti-gun narrative most media outlets seem to favor.
Yeah, we're not exactly fans.
However, that's all the stuff that anyone can find out easily.
Over at The Gun Writer, which is the Second Amendment Foundation’s Investigative Journalism Project, writer Lee Williams did a little digging into the group.
I don't think they'll be happy with what he found.
97Percent’s executive director, Olivia Troye, said during a recent appearance on ABC’s The View, that her group’s mission is “to bring gun owners into the conversation and to bring them to the table, in order to work on reducing gun deaths happening across the country, while including them in the solutions.”
Troye was unwilling to bring one particular gun owner into the conversation or to the table. She declined to be interviewed for this story.
Despite Troye’s attempts to stake out a moderate and centrist position, an investigation by the Second Amendment Foundation’s Investigative Journalism Project found that 97Percent is nothing more than a run-of-the-mill anti-gun group, albeit one with better messaging and PR.
Some of the findings include:
97Percent has supported an “assault weapon” ban.
97Percent has supported a standard-capacity magazine ban.
97Percent has supported a bump-stock ban.
97Percent has supported expanded red-flag laws.
97Percent has supported permits to carry firearms.
97Percent has supported permits to purchase firearms.
97Percent has supported permits to possess firearms.
97Percent has supported the loss of Second Amendment rights upon conviction of a “violent misdemeanor.”
97Percent has supported mandatory storage laws, which would lead to mandatory home inspections by police.
97Percent has supported mandatory background checks, without acknowledging they would lead to mandatory firearm registration and the creation of a national gun registry.
97Percent claims the Second Amendment is “overprotected.”
97Percent claims “rapid fire guns” are not used for hunting or home defense but doesn’t define the term.
97Percent claims popular semi-automatic firearms are “weapons of war.”
97Percent claims constitutional carry results in increased homicide rates.
97Percent’s advisory board is stocked with radical anti-gun extremists, including a former president of the Brady campaign.
Mark Oliva, public affairs director for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the trade association for the firearm industry, said 97Percent “masquerades as a centrist organization when in reality, it is just another radical element similar to the other gun control groups vying for attention.”
Go and read the entire thing. It's important that we expose exactly who these people are.
You see, 97Percent likes to pretend they're the "sensible" gun owners and others who aren't quite the same as Everytown or Brady, but look at who all is involved for a moment. The board is literally littered with anti-gun jihadists.
The only two people who seem remotely disconnected from that are two former NRA lobbyists. They don't have the history with gun control that others do, but one of those worked for the NRA for less than a year, then suddenly had some kind of epiphany after Sandy Hook and changed her supposedly wicked ways.
Yet beyond that are nothing but your typical anti-gun zealots and look at what I quoted above. How is that any different than Everytown, Brady, Giffords, or any other anti-gun group you care to name?
I can buy the belief that many gun owners are OK with universal background checks or red flag laws. I don't agree, but I can see why they'd figure those things wouldn't come back to bite them in the butt.
What I can't buy is that this group that supposedly wants to represent "sensible" gun owners thinks any of us favor permit-to-purchase and permit-to-possess laws. That's just gun registration with a slightly different framing. There's no way most gun owners would favor such a thing.
They're lying to the American people. We already suspected it and then we had previous evidence of it, but there can be no doubt at all. 97Percent is supposedly named after the percentage of the American people who favor gun control.
It's really named after the percentage of absolute BS they spew. The problem is that they lowballed it.
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