Everytown Goes Hunting for Credibility

The irony is nothing short of comedy. Multiple outlets are having a field day with the Michael Bloomberg-backed Everytown organization, which has spent years and millions of dollars supporting extreme restrictions on lawful gun ownership, now purporting to offer hunter education courses. The very same group that continues to dedicate resources to treating gun ownership as a disease in need of a cure wants to expand their ‘firearm safety’ courses to hunting while positioning themselves as authorities on teaching people how to exercise the very rights they work so hard to eliminate.

It’s particularly ironic as Everytown strongly criticizes the National Rifle Association (NRA), the preeminent organization that has spent generations doing the work they now embrace as so important. The camouflage might be new, but the anti-gun agenda has not changed and never will.

Long before Everytown suddenly discovered hunter education, NRA was building the foundation on which modern hunter education rests. In 1949, the NRA worked with the state of New York to develop the nation's first statewide hunter education program and its curriculum. The NRA hunter safety handbook was subsequently adopted and is used across the country today for firearm instruction, youth programs, and NRA’s free online hunter education course. which is accepted as fulfilling hunting training requirements in numerous states.

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.

You can't spend years treating lawful gun ownership as a problem and then put on a blaze orange vest and pretend that you're a trusted voice of America's hunting tradition. A friendly and responsible word for the anti-gun crowd suddenly discovering hunter education: for your own safety, check out NRA’s wide variety of training opportunities at NRA Education and Training.

The NRA has been teaching Americans firearm safety, marksmanship, and responsible firearm handling for more than 150 years backed by established training programs and instructors more than proud to list their full names and relevant resumes.

So before reinventing yourselves as outdoor people, consider not making firearm training a political stunt or rebranding exercise. Firearms training of any kind is to be taken seriously. Take an NRA course.