Anyone who actually watches Everytown's hunter training video for anything other than comedy deserves everything that comes of it. They also deserve a fair bit of mockery. Why? Because the anti-gun group is going to tell you how to hunt with a gun? Really?
But one claim that surfaced in the training, and not a new one, needs to be addressed.
In the video, a claim is made about an increase in shootings during the first week of hunting season.
The folks at the Buckeye Firearms Association had a little fun with that one.
Just as Everytown’s instructors are vaguely credentialed, so is the inspiration for its hunter safety training grounded in a singular and predictably vague “study.” In the study, researchers claimed that more people were killed by gunfire in the first week of deer hunting season than any other week of the calendar year. However, the “researchers” used as a single source the Gun Violence Archive (GVA), not any kind of hunter-incident based dataset.
The GVA has long been challenged as an unreliable tool with improper methodology, particularly because it relies heavily on media reports rather than any uniform government reporting system. In this particular study, it appears their outcome encompasses any shooting occurring in selected counties around hunting season rather than only those directly related to hunting.
The authors also appear to run their analysis excluding those tagged as hunting-related accidents and report that the results were nearly identical. Among the many other limitations of this “study” is the lack of distinction between incidents involving handguns and long guns, even though the latter are overwhelmingly the sorts of firearms used for hunting.
In the end, the study found nothing noteworthy to do with hunting or hunters, and certainly nothing that makes Everytown somehow especially suited to suddenly start lecturing hunters on their peculiar brand of “gun safety.” That surprises exactly no one. It is the same scenario as when Everytown first began offering firearm training, as NRA-ILA reported on last year HERE and HERE.
The truth is that the so-called experts at Everytown are all deficient in understanding the nuances of actually using a firearm for, well, anything. Going to them for training is like going to Lindsay Clancy or Casey Anthony for childcare advice. You just shouldn't do it.
The claim was always dubious, but seeing that there was no connection to actual hunting isn't very surprising.
The Gun Violence Archive isn't a tracking tool, as their founder claims. It's a tool for activists. We've long condemned how it supposedly tracks "mass shootings" and how it includes numerous examples that weren't traditionally considered mass shootings. The media, unfortunately, latched onto this definition, so now everything is a mass shooting rather than gang warfare or something else.
Everyone's reliance on GVA is part of that. They like how the books are cooked there. It's got all of their favorite seasonings, the 11 herbs and spices of gun control activism meant to "taste" like unbiased research.
Kind of like everything their research arm cooks up, really.
And let's understand that we hear this all the time. They really should be careful with that, though, because every state in the nation requires a hunter safety course, and that sort of undermines their claim that mandatory safety training should be required.
Of course, since hunting isn't a preserved right in the Constitution, it's different anyway.
Plus, at least when I took hunter safety classes, my instructor had a full name and a set of credentials that could be reviewed. No one at Everytown's class even seems to have a last name. Strange, don't you think?
Then again, when you're reading such a poorly sourced script, I suspect you'd rather remain as anonymous as possible.
