By Dave Workman
Editor-in-Chief
A new report from the Second Amendment Foundation’s director of legal research and education has once again shown how the gun prohibition lobby is more interested in ratcheting down on the rights of law-abiding gun owners than reducing violent crime.
It is a subject TGM has previously discussed how groups such as Everytown for Gun Safety and Giffords give high marks to states with strict gun control laws, even though the murder rates in those states are high.
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.”
“Twenty-nine states allowed constitutional carry throughout 2025, and in the FBI’s 2025 data their murder rates were not significantly different from permit states, and outside the South, no different at all,” the report says.
Why is this important? Too many in the media, for example, treat Everytown pronouncements on guns and crime to be tantamount to gospel. When it can be shown how their data doesn’t match body counts, it puts their credibility in doubt.
