By Lee Williams
SAF Investigative Journalism Project
I can still recall bits and pieces of my first hunter-safety course, and I was in middle school at the time. My dad accompanied me. All of the other students brought a parent too. It was a terrific time, especially when we went to the range. I still own the single-shot .22 rifle I used in the course. It was my very first gun.
The course was led by instructors from the National Rifle Association, which was extremely important. The NRA has been around for 154 years. Its experts have taught millions of students. Any issues with the training had been worked out decades and decades before it was my turn. Like every training course NRA offers, the main goal is always safety.
Everytown for Gun Safety now offers what they call a “hunter’s course.” Its main goal is propaganda, not safety. They want to stop gun ownership before it starts by misleading their “students” with false data.
“Like every other Train SMART course, Gun Safety for Hunters is backed by data and taught by experts—in this case, hunters with decades of experience who are deeply committed to gun safety and driven to help reduce the number of hunting-related gun deaths and injuries. A 2024 study revealed a stark reality: More people in rural counties were killed by gunfire in the first week of deer hunting season than in any other week of the calendar year,” Everytown claims on its TRAIN SMART website.
First, let’s take a look at the study Everytown is pimping, and then we’ll take a look at some of their “experts” who are teaching their new course.
The 2024 study Everytown cites, “Deer Hunting Season and Firearm Violence in US Rural Counties,” was written by Patrick Sharkey, PhD; Juan Camilo Cristancho, BA, and Daniel Semenza, PhD.
Sharkey is affiliated with Princeton University’s School of Public and International Affairs. Cristancho works at the University of California, Irvine’s School of Education, and Semenza is affiliated with the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center at Rutgers University.
All three staunch anti-gun researchers claim deer hunting is associated with a substantial increase in firearm violence.
To arrive at their conclusion, the authors used data from the infamous Gun Violence Archive, or GVA, which has been debunked dozens of times and is well known for its shoddy research and biased statistics.
Anytime four or more people are killed or even slightly wounded with a firearm, the GVA labels it a mass shooting. According to the FBI and its more realistic definition, there were 30 mass shootings in 2019. The GVA claims there were 417. Despite the obvious bad math, the legacy media, politicians and the gun-ban industry treat GVA’s reports as gospel.
Even Sharkey and his team admitted there were problems with the GVA data.
“Our study relies on shooting data from a single source, the GVA. Data from GVA have been shown to have a bias toward incidents that receive more media attention and do not include comprehensive counts of firearm suicides,” the report states.
According to his Princeton bio, Sharkey’s research focuses on “urban inequality, violence, and public policy.” He is also the creator of AmericanViolence.org, a website that claims it provides “comprehensive, updated data on violence from as many of the largest 100 largest U.S. cities as possible.”
Sharkey’s website, like his recent study, relies upon GVA’s debunked data.
“In the latest iteration of the site we have drawn more heavily on data on fatal and nonfatal shootings published by the Gun Violence Archive, an excellent resource that has tracked all forms of gun violence in the United States over time,” the website states.
Sharkey’s study is a twofer for the gun ban industry, as it denigrates both hunting and gun ownership. Nowhere in the report do the researchers mention the dangers associated with an overabundance of deer, which would occur if hunting was ever banned or reduced.
Citing Starkey’s made-up findings along with fake data from the GVA, makes Everytown’s hunter’s course the worst propaganda possible, and don’t forget their target audience is children.
Nameless experts
Everytown’s hunter’s course is taught online by the same eight instructors it uses for its other TRAIN SMART courses.
There’s Stephanie, who “owns a gun for protection.”
There’s Craig, whose “earliest and fondest memories involved shooting BB guns with his father and grandfather.”
And don’t forget Dan, who taught “strategic and operational planning, leadership, and unconventional warfare at the Swedish Defense University in Stockholm.”
None of the instructors provided their last names, their credentials or even where they were trained, but they are all beautiful people and very diverse, which is probably much more important to the folks at Everytown than their CVs.
Takeaways
I wrote a story last year after actually taking one of Everytown’s online courses, the “Smart Guide to Buying a Gun.”
It was truly the longest hour-and-a-half of my life.
There was no way I could ever do that again.
Apparently, I’m not alone.
Everytown recently admitted that only 700 people have taken one of its firearms training courses, which should be an extreme embarrassment for any group that calls itself the “largest gun violence prevention organization in America.”
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