By Dave Workman
Everytown for Gun Safety, the Michael Bloomberg-backed gun prohibition lobbying group, is pulling out all the stops in its campaign against H.R. 8, the bill which would make national concealed carry reciprocity a realty.
Lately, Everytown has been flooding Facebook with advertising loaded with inflammatory assertions such as, “Our lawmakers should focus on keeping communities safe, not making it easier to carry hidden, loaded guns in more places,” and “The gun lobby and MAGA extremists want to override your state’s gun safety laws — making it easier for more people to carry hidden, loaded guns in public.”
Research by the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC) founded by author and gun researcher Dr. John Lott indicates that people licensed to carry concealed handguns are “extremely law-abiding.”
In a July 2025 interview with Axios, Renee Hopkins, CEO at the Seattle-based Alliance for Gun Responsibility, another billionaire-backed gun prohibition lobbying group, told the publication “CPL holders tend to be responsible gun owners.”
Everytown complains in its advertising, “Over 200 lawmakers in Congress are pushing a bill that would make every community less safe — letting people from other states with dangerous histories carry hidden, loaded guns in states that wouldn’t otherwise let them.”
According to CPRC’s most recent data on concealed carry in the U.S., there are an estimate 20.88 million active concealed carry licenses and permits in the U.S. However, due to the fact that in 29 states, licenses are no longer require to carry, the actual number of legally-armed citizens is likely much higher, which the CPRC acknowledges.
“After peaking in 2022,” this year’s report note, “the number of Concealed Carry Permit holders across the United States has declined for the third year in a row. The total now sits at 20.88million, representing a 2.7% drop from last year. A major factor behind this ongoing decrease is the widespread adoption of Constitutional Carry laws.”
All of those millions of legally armed citizens do not appear to be causing any serious problems.
This isn’t the only bit of excessive activity by anti-gunners.
Writing at America’s First Freedom, a publication owned by the National Rifle Association, veteran journalist Charles C.W. Cooke noted, “For nearly a decade now, it has been all but impossible to read any major piece of journalism that mentions firearms without coming across a rote recitation of the preposterously inflated statistics that are regularly put out by the Gun Violence Archive…In 2015, for example, the Gun Violence Archive claimed that there were 335 mass shootings. The actual number, per the FBI, was six. Defending himself from this criticism, the executive director of the Gun Violence Archive insisted that his organization merely compiles numbers and then lets ‘the user make interpretive decisions.’ But this is nonsense. The entire purpose of the Gun Violence Archive’s methodology is to persuade the American public that there is a Columbine each and every day.”
More than ten years ago, anti-gunners put together what amounted to a “gun control playbook” titled “Preventing Gun Violence Through Effective Messaging.” Among the things this publication advised is, “Always focus on emotional and value-driving arguments about gun violence, not the political food fight in Washington or wonky statistics.”
