While everyone must strive to keep guns out of unintentional hands, reports by Everytown on how often his happens among children with tragic results is greatly exaggerated.

Children unintentionally shot and killed more than 157 people last year and wounded more than 270, or so Everytown for Gun Safety would have you believe. NBC News was the first media outlet to lap up this fake-news story.

“The children who pulled the trigger were most often teenagers ages 14 to 17 or children ages 5 and under, according to Everytown’s data, which is compiled from media reports,” the NBC News story claims.

Therein lies the problem: Everytown’s data is about as useful as an ashtray on a motorcycle. It is so chock-full of errors that using it to draw any conclusion would become a study in futility. It is pure GIGO: Garbage In, Garbage Out.

No one wants a firearm to fall into the wrong hands. On that, everyone can agree. However, as usual, Everytown uses their fake data to advocate for more gun control, in this case mandatory storage laws, which would of course be followed by mandatory home inspections by police, to make sure gun owners were storing their firearms in accordance with the law.

Media Reports

Very few sources are as unreliable as initial media accounts, especially when they’re based upon a hasty press release sent by a law enforcement agency after a shooting.

These press releases often contain statements made at the scene by traumatized family members, victims or witnesses, many of whom later become suspects after a more thorough investigation is conducted. These folks will attempt to dodge culpability by telling officers the gun just went off, or someone was playing with it or they were cleaning the weapon and it magically discharged.

The press releases are most often reported by relative youngsters themselves – new journalists fresh out of college and working at local news outlets such as a small town paper. The absolute last thing they would ever do is question information sent by a sheriff or chief of police. Instead, the release gets a quick write-up and then lives forever on the internet, regardless of the accuracy of the initial data, until Everytown or another anti-gun aggregator uses it to support their biased views.

Gang-Related Data Not Excluded  

There are more than 100,000 documented gang members just in the city of Chicago. Other large cities are similarly cursed. By far, gang members and unaffiliated drug crews account for the largest number of shootings in the United States, whether they involve juveniles and/or adults. However, news coverage of these shootings rarely addresses the gang affiliation of the shooter or victim.

Gangsters almost never tell police who shot them. They will be the first to make up a story about the weapon miraculously or unintentionally discharging. They seek out their own justice, which leads to more shootings. This is why most seasoned gang investigators will tell you that today’s victim will be tomorrow’s suspect.

One of the entries included in Everytown’s data involves a 2018 shooting in New Orleans. It doesn’t take a criminologist to understand gang involvement likely played a role.

“A group of teenage boys were taking photos of themselves while posing with guns. When witnesses called the police, one of the boys, who was 14, ran away, causing a handgun in his waistband to unintentionally fire and hit him in the leg. Police are continuing to investigate the incident,” the data states.

Gangsters shoot more people intentionally than unintentionally – the supposed topic of Everytown’s report. As long as the left and the legacy media they control refuse to cull out shootings by gang members, their data will always be suspect.

Frequently impeached Source

Several of the entries in Everytown’s data were based upon information from the Gun Violence Archive. To be clear, the Gun Violence Archive is not a media source. Like Everytown, it is an aggregator of media reports and, like Everytown, far from a credible source.

The Gun Violence Archive has been debunked more than any other anti-gun group because they knowingly publish false mass-shooing data, and they don’t care how it is misused.

The Gun Violence Archive, or GVA, was founded in 2013 by Michael Klein, a left-leaning philanthropist and open-government advocate, and Mark Bryant, a retired computer analyst and GVA’s current executive director.

According to Bryant’s all-inclusive definition, there were 417 mass shootings in 2019. The FBI says there were 30, because it uses a much narrower and more accurate definition.

While the GVA collects and publishes several different types of shooting data – mass murders, number of children and teens killed or injured, officer-involved shootings, defenses gun usages and more – it is their inflated mass-shooting numbers that are cited most often by the mainstream media, given its penchant for sensational headlines.

In a previous interview with the Second Amendment Foundation, Bryant defended his broader definition and the higher body count it yields.

“It doesn’t parse,” he said. “It gives an accurate picture of the number of times more than four people were shot, whether in a drive-by or a shooting at a rap concert or a country music concert.”

If his higher numbers are misleading the public or being misinterpreted by journalists, it’s not his fault, Bryant claimed. He believes his numbers are fair. “I do, but I think it’s also up to the journalist and the reader to have a better understanding of what the data says. When a journalist uses the mass-shooting numbers as their lead, they’re not looking at the whole situation.”

Any database that uses GVA data cannot be trusted.

False CDC Claims

One of the most repeated falsehoods that Everytown still links to their data states that firearms – not motor vehicle deaths – are the leading cause of death for children.

This was factchecked last year by AWR Hawkins of Breitbart News.

In 2020, Hawkins found that 2,281 were children killed by firearms, but 2,503 were killed in motor vehicle crashes.

“Moreover, according to CDC numbers, children are 27 times more likely to die in an accidental car death than in an accidental gun death, and unintentional suffocation deaths are 10 times higher among children than accidental gun deaths,” Hawkins reported.

Everytown isn’t the only anti-gun outlet to cite false CDC data. Vice President Kamala Harris has parroted the claims – even after they were factchecked – several times.

Consider the Source

Everytown for Gun Safety is bankrolled by former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg. It is one of his premier Astroturf (non-grassroots) gun-control groups. Everytown’s action fund has more than $18 million in assets. Its support fund has more than $48 million. Bloomberg’s net worth is estimated at more than $100 billion.

Everytown’s president, John Feinblatt, is also president of the Trace, the propaganda arm of Bloomberg’s anti-gun empire. Both groups have become adept at creating propaganda and pumping it out to a willing media.

That’s exactly how Everytown’s latest report should be received. It is nothing more than anti-gun propaganda designed for anti-gun propagandists.

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24 COMMENTS

  3. There is Zero reason to note ANYTHING about “The Gun Violence Archive”. NOTHING they spew is true/accurate. Ignore the SOBS.

  4. Wait so their cooked up numbers were less than the annual firearm related woundings and more than a few years of homicides of just the city of Wilmington down in Biden land? Assuming even half of those numbers are correct the rate of occurrence would peg most actions to address it as diminishing returns given what is already in place re training and education (which honestly could be expanded with minimal investment and likely decrease the non gang related issues).

    • Not some much as cooked the numbers. They simple changed the definition just like they did to define mass murders. We were warned about this tactic by George Orwell when he wrote about ‘Newspeak’ in ‘1984’. Changing the meaning and definition of a word, phrase or parameter to support the intended ideology.

      • Would still say cooked up but you are not wrong with Orwell as I see that fairly often as it is more a guiding principle than a warning to many up here. Still it has been fun introducing basic concepts of liberty to traditional democrats up my way. May not get a republican governor next time but keeping or even expanding congress critters that are conservative(ish) is increasingly possible.

  5. Even if Everytown’s figures are correct, that number of deaths is misuscle. Is this a big enough problem to deprive half of US citizens their legally owned property?

    Let’s see 25,000,000 “assault rifles” at a cost to confiscate of $2,000 each. That is $50 billion to somehow magically save at most 400 people. If this worked it would cost $125,000,000 per life saved. This does not count the thousands of police officers and civilians who would be killed during such a rash venture. Do those lives matter at all?

    This assumes that someone who did not have an AR, but did have a deer rifle would for some reason decide not to shoot somebody else.

    Progressives get mad when you mention the cost of doing these things, but they never see any downside to their brilliant ideas.

    • Sturmgewehr is a nazi germany word meaning Assault Rifle. Assault Rifles are something Gun Control nazis had and defenseless Jews did not have. Therefore Everytown is following the footsteps left by Gun Control nazis.

  7. theBiden doesn’t like gunms so I don’t either.
    I only like things theBiden tells me I like.
    Universal background checks and safe storage laws. Yes.
    Asshalt weapons firing fully semiautomatic with extra high capacity mugazines.
    No.

  8. “Bloomberg”, “Feinblatt”, that’s the problem right there ie. the anti-gun cancer rampant among U.S. Jewry. After Israel was attacked by the Democrat’s newest caucus, the Hamastinians, Bloomberg made a paltry donation to fund an ambulance to cart victims away not funds for firearms with which the civilian populace could defend itself from the bloodthirsty savages.

  9. To often facts get in their way of swaying the easily persuaded ignorant masses! They only try and use the scary half twisted crapola that catches attention. They like to fool themselves that they actually believe the bullish cowpies the leave in their path for the betterment but often fewer rights for us.

  10. In March, 2023 I went through the December, 2022 Gun Violence Archive data. I waited that long because I found most of the stories had been updated with more facts by then.

    First, GVA never updates its listing with updated news stories, even when the story they link to has been updated.

    Second, every single one of them where enough information was presented involved a prohibited person. Domestic Violence arrest gets out on bail, and shoots family. 17 year old Gang Member gets acquitted in murder trial and gets shot at his acquittal party by friends of the person he was on trial for murdering, etc.

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