No one will be shocked to learn that Everytown said something anti-gun.

In similarly earth-shattering news, water is wet, the sky is blue, and Shannon Watts and David Hogg are idiots.

Everytown, though, gets treated like some kind of unbiased organization by the media, who parrots their research and claims as if they're irrefutable. Of course, I refute them all the time, and I'm far from unique in doing so, but this is how the media treats them.

Which is silly.

At their own site, though, they publish a bunch of pieces all about how great gun control is. It usually takes the form of some kind of research or academic work, but it's all anti-gun propaganda. This one, though, is particularly stupid.

I'm going to have to take this piece, titled, "'Chaos and Uncertainty': A Concealed Carry Mandate is Dangerous and Unpopular," paragraph by paragraph for a bit because, well, they pack a lot of stupid in a short span of time.

New York City is the largest city in the United States and the most visited, welcoming nearly 65 million tourists in 2024 alone.¹ And while navigating Times Square can be a challenge, tourists getting up early for a bagel or staying out late on Broadway can rest assured that they are in one of the safest large cities in the country—with a gun homicide rate four times lower than the average large US city.²Everytown analysis of 2022–2023 FBI Supplementary Homicide Report (accessed December 2023) and 2022–2023 FBI National Incident-Based Reporting System (accessed October 2024), https://everytownresearch.org/report/city-data/.

Now, notice that this is from 2022 to 2023. This is after the Bruen decision issued the exact same kind of mandate they're trying to claim would be problematic. Sure, it wasn't a nationwide reciprocity, but there were a lot more lawful people carrying guns in New York City than before, and it seems crime wasn't enough of a problem to warrant Everytown's attention.

Fascinating, don't you think?

One reason for New York’s low gun homicide rate is its strong gun laws, including a requirement that gun owners obtain a permit to carry a concealed gun in public. While states that have repealed strong permitting requirements have seen dramatic increases in violence in the decade that followed,³ New York has avoided that fate in part by retaining strong licensing laws. 

So I read the study at that footnote. I was fascinated to see how they reached that conclusion.

See, when you look at numbers, you need something to compare it to. Often, that's the period before such laws go on the books or states with similarities but not without the law, or something else. Every effort has potential pitfalls, of course, because no comparison is perfect and there are flaws with all of them.

But that study used a control known as a "synthetic control."

Basically, they made a bunch of assumptions, gathered data based on that assumption, and created a synthetic state where the laws didn't get passed, then compared the two and reached their conclusion. This isn't unheard of in social sciences.

Yet there's a big problem here.

Synthetic controls are only as good as the assumptions they're based on, and we have ample reason to be more than a little distrustful of gun research as a whole. Especially when it flies in the face of other research that suggests otherwise.

But legislators in Congress are now threatening to end this rule—and the peace of mind it provides. These lawmakers are pushing a federal mandate that would override carefully crafted gun safety laws, like New York’s, commanding states to ignore their own laws and instead allow people from across the country to carry loaded, hidden handguns in public without even so much as a permit or background check. Such a mandate would force each state to allow violent offenders from out of state to carry firearms within its borders—even if those people could not otherwise legally buy a gun in that state or were from one of 29 states that don’t require a license to carry at all. This would jeopardize public safety and tourism in New York City and in cities and towns across the country by undermining the permitting systems that keep people safe and that reflect the will of local voters. 

Now, of course, we're editorializing. 

First, while a national constitutional carry bill is on the table, national reciprocity is a much more likely outcome. Everytown knows this, but they're attacking the constitutional carry side and hoping people will confuse the two issues and oppose both.

Even if the measure were to cover those of us from constitutional carry states, though, let's remember that criminals are already carrying firearms without permits in the first place. They do it all the time and have done it since the first gun control laws in the city were passed. Nothing is going to change on that front.

Dangerous results will follow: If one of the leading mandate proposals were to become federal law, New York City Police Department officers could not arrest a man from South Carolina with a history of domestic violence for carrying his loaded firearm without a license through the city on his way to find his estranged girlfriend. Further, the police officers involved could even be sued for stopping him and asking questions. Perhaps this is the reason the policy is broadly opposed by the public and has long been unpopular with law enforcement.⁴

First, this is a hypothetical that ignores how New York laws make it harder for the estranged girlfriend to carry a gun herself, which would allow her to defend herself from the man in the first place.

Further, even if he were caught and arrested under current laws, he'd be back on the streets in no time at all, as we've seen repeatedly in the city. The average man doesn't need a gun to kill the average woman. He can do it with his bare hands. The thing is, if he doesn't have a gun, Everytown doesn't care about the murder anymore. They're quite good with people being stabbed or beaten to death, apparently.

Then we have the fact that this is a constitutionally protected right.

We don't curtail rights simply because it's popular to do so. That's why certain rights were expressly protected in the Constitution in the first place. These are rights that shouldn't be infringed upon under any circumstances. One of those is the Second Amendment.

And let's be real here, when you look at the questions asked in these polls, and consider the false information peddled on the news regularly--false information often coming from groups like Everytown--one has to wonder how much the respondents actually know about any of this. How many actually think the AR-15 is used in every mass shooting in North America? How many think people who lawfully carry firearms are responsible for violent crime? How many things "ghost guns" are the single biggest threat on the streets today?

The truth is that AR-15s have become more and more popular for mass murderers because of the media's harping on them. Privately made firearms became a thing for criminals because the media and politicians started drawing attention to their existence. That never seems to make the studies.

Of course, that's also a bit of a tangent, but it ties into the fact that the media presents something that may or may not reflect reality, and while we try to debunk it, let's understand that CBS News isn't hitting Bearing Arms on the daily to make sure they got their stuff right. They should, but they won't.

So when an underinformed public starts showing support for something, I'm less than impressed than I might otherwise be. I won't give up my rights because of the whims of the masses, but when those masses are fed a diet of absolute BS, I'm even less inclined to do so.

First, much of that polling is from a couple of years ago.

With the current ugliness, though, I suspect that some people have revised their opinions significantly.

Everytown will, of course, ignore anything that doesn't support their position and continue spouting whatever polls confirm their biases, at least until they get a new one.

The whole thing would be laughable if people didn't take them seriously for some stupid reason.