Various special interest groups like to grade states and politicians. This is a shorthand way to tell supporters how these entities stand on the special interest. The NRA has long graded politicians, for example, and both sides tout their grades. Anti-gunners are proud of their "F" grades while pro-gunners love the "A" after their name, just for example. Gun control groups do the same, particularly for states.
And those grades are meant to tell you about how those states address gun control. In particular, do they have the laws that these groups think are important?
If gun control works, though, there should be some correlation between the grades and the homicide rates.
The Second Amendment Foundation's Kostas Moros, however, has found that such a correlation doesn't really exist.
According to Kostas Moros, whose research can be found here, and his latest report, headlined “Everytown’s Rankings are a Poor Predictor of State Murder Rates,” data from the gun ban crowd is essentially deceptive.
“Both Giffords and Everytown evaluate states based on the strength of their gun laws,” Moros explains in the report, “and present their state rankings as relevant to public safety discussions. But in the FBI’s 2025 data, a state’s Everytown ranking had little to no correlation to its murder rate. This is especially true when excluding Southern states, which have long had high homicide rates even when they had stricter gun laws. The same applies to whether or not a state has adopted constitutional carry, which likewise shows no significant link to murder rates.”
In an exchange of email with TGM, Moros observed, “The basic promise of gun control is that if you would just agree to give up pieces of your liberty, you will score increases in safety. The data in our fact sheet shows that is not true.”
Here are three examples of how the Everytown rankings do not match reality.
- New Hampshire ranked #43 of 50 by Everytown, yet it had the lowest murder rate in the U.S.
- New Mexico (#16): 9.1 ranked favorably by Everytown, it had the highest murder rate of any state in the FBI’s 2025 data.
- Idaho (#50): 1.9 ranked last by Everytown, it had a lower murder rate than California (#1, 3.5) and New York (#4, 2.4).
While Everytown has asserted that, “Emerging data shows that states that have passed permitless carry legislation are experiencing a substantial increase in gun violence,” the new Moros report bluntly states, “Everytown is wrong.”
Everytown is usually wrong. That comment by Moros is evergreen.
See, neither Everytown nor Giffords actually cares about doing any critical examination of the laws they try to advance. So long as a state has a given law on the books, they move up in the standings. That's it. That's all there is to it.
At least with the NRA's grades for lawmakers, it's a predictive measure that gives us an idea of how someone might vote in the future, which is the point. It tells you who supports your gun rights and who doesn't.
But the anti-gun groups' grades are nothing more than an "atta-boy" for those states that have bent the knee and an cudgel for those who have refused. After all, when the grades come out, media in pro-gun states start with the onslaught of how terrible the state scored, all without a moment of critical thinking about how those grades might or might not correlate to violent crime.
After all, we've got more Second Amendment freedoms restored now than at any point in my lifetime, and we've got the lowest violent crime I think we've ever seen in that same 53-year span.
No one is surprised to see that these grades aren't predictors of anything, just a pat on the head for being good anti-gun drones, but having the numbers and the breakdown is important. They're talking points, and while anti-gunners won't listen to Moros or the Second Amendment Foundation, the point isn't to convince Everytown to shut their doors forever. There's too much money involved for that to happen.
The point is that people like you can use them to engage others on the topic of gun control and dissuade at least some people from falling down that rabbit hole.
