By Lee Williams
SAF Investigative Journalism Project
Everytown’s new firearm training classes are about as honest and realistic as the journalism produced by its paid staffers at the Trace.
In fact, the amount of anti-gun propaganda produced by Everytown’s Train Smart instructors may actually exceed the anti-gun propaganda shoveled out by the kids at the Trace. Suffice it to say, it’s a close race.
The fun began with a 1.5-hour video class called “The Smart Guide to Buying a Gun.” Cost was $20. Students can take the class live or on-demand. There are two additional classes, including an 8-hour trip to the range, which you watch from home.
Nellis and Jake were the instructors. None of Everytown’s trainers provide their last names, which is very telling. Most real instructors provide all of their training and experience in addition to their full names.
Nellis, according to her bio, is “a mother and advocate, she is committed to building safer environments and believes that all children deserve a future free from gun violence.”
Neither of the instructors ever mentioned what their kids actually deserve or how they create “welcoming spaces.”
Besides their missing last names, none of Everytown’s training staff list their actual instructor 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.
Before Nellis and Jake were even on screen, Everytown unleashed a massive liability warning.
Does this mean Everytown’s firearms instructors aren’t “qualified professionals?” Can’t real firearm training serve as a defense if you ever have to use a firearm to defend yourself or your loved ones?
Instructor Jake began by cautioning viewers that no students should have access to a firearm during the course.
“We’ll be talking about tough topics like firearm homicides and suicides,” he warned the class.
If anyone wanted to learn more about gun ownership than Jake and Nellis were willing to teach, they were told to go to Everytown.org.
The instructor duo then presented an incredibly fictional group of statistics, which the site claimed came from the “Annals of Internal Medicine and American Journal of Public Health.”
By owning a gun, you double your chances of dying by homicide, they falsely claimed. And access to a firearm inside a home triples your chances and everyone in your home’s chances of dying by suicide. These, however, were not the worst claims.
“The presence of a gun in a domestic violence situation makes it five times more likely that the woman will be killed,” Nellis claimed. “And according to the National Network to End Domestic Violence, when a male abuser has access to a firearm, the risk that he’s going to shoot and kill a female increases by 1,000 percent.”
Everytown has always had problems with the truth. Moms Demand Action and Mayors Against Illegal Guns have decried hundreds of school shootings, but when the shootings are actually examined, they consist of a list of incidents that often doesn’t involve actual bad guys or students or schools or guns.
One so-called shooting involved a school bus being hit with a BB. Others involved negligent discharges. Many never even happened during school hours. When the list was examined thoroughly, many of the claims were found to be seriously overinflated.
Nellis, too, had real problems with overinflation, in addition to numbers, tactics and the truth.
“Since 2020, guns have been the leading cause of death for children age 1 to 17,” she falsely claimed.
All weapons, she said, should be kept unloaded—period. Her reasoning was nonsensical.
“That might be a little controversial. It might even defeat the point, but hold on. Every second matters when you need a gun. Some people believe it’s okay to keep a gun on a nightstand. If you’re moving so fast that you don’t have time to access your gun, you likely don’t have time to confirm your target before shooting. Once that bullet leaves your gun, it ain’t coming back, and you may actually live in a state that requires you to lock up your gun,” she said.
Jake even brought racist police officers into the training.
“Police interactions may be risky for black gun owners,” he said. “We want to acknowledge that. Gather more information about police in your area.”
The two instructors stressed the false benefits of home security systems—alarms, signs, decals, doorbell cameras, fences, landscaping and other external barriers such as cacti and thorny plants. These are great ideas, until the bad guy enters the victim’s home.
Their solution?
“Adopt a dog,” they said. “A lot of self-defense instructors say dogs are better defense against intruders than guns. Consider getting a dog.”
When the instructor duo described the types of guns available, the forgot to even mention the country’s most popular rifle. The video does not show a single photo of an AR or any other popular semi-automatic rifle.
Takeaways
What Nellis and Jake excelled at was parroting small doses of real gun safety information without giving the author the credit they deserve. They showed a quick video that stressed Col. Jeff Cooper’s Four General Firearm Safety Rules. The good colonel, of course, was never mentioned.
Neither Nellis nor Jake ever mentioned how the Four Rules became standardized or how they progress logically from one to another. Instead, former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg’s kids acted like they invented the rules themselves, which is about what you’d expect.
Truth be known, Col. Cooper’s rules were about the only realistic information offered during the entire hour-and-a-half of training time.
This video tried to scare students. Guns are dangerous and should be unloaded, disassembled and locked up, the instructors repeatedly said.
Everytown’s so-called training course is chock-full of fear, which they use to scare folks so they won’t ever consider buying a firearm, much less carrying one. As you’d expect, this makes it propaganda—anti-gun propaganda.
It is definitely not firearm training. It’s not even close.
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