The Everytown for Gun Safety Action Fund is launching a $1.5 million “student-led initiative to register 100,000 new Gun Sense voters,” according to email messages from Everytown forwarded to Liberty Park Press and TheGunMag.com.
The groups are looking ahead to June 5, the date designated as “Gun Violence Awareness Day,” when anti-rights activists will be wearing orange “to honor the more than 100 Americans shot and killed every day and the hundreds more who are wounded.”
However, that number is deceptive because an estimated 70 to 80 percent of people who die annually from gunshot wounds are suicides. To claim they are “shot and killed” suggests they are the victims of violent crime.
According to the annual FBI Uniform Crime Report, fewer than 12,000 people are murdered with firearms each year. Between the years 2008 and 2015, the tallies were less than 10,000, according to FBI data. In 2018, the most recent year for which data is available, 10,265 people were murdered with firearms.
Rights activists have long complained that the gun prohibition lobby routinely—and dishonestly—combine the homicide and suicide statistics, and perhaps toss in accidents and maybe even justifiable homicides, to inflate the statistics and create the impression the U.S. is in the midst of a violent crime wave.
Some also suggest it’s a bad way to launch a new campaign by using misleading rhetoric.
Everytown is determined to flip Congress and state legislatures, including Texas, by turning out young voters.
“We’re committed to registering young voters and increasing youth turnout in 2020 because we know that lives are on the line,” Everytown says in its email announcement.
They plan to set up “virtual campaign offices with cutting edge tools and training” across the country. Organizers are being hired in “battleground states,” and notably absent from that list are Washington and Oregon, suggesting anti-gun Democrats take those states for granted.
Here is the list of so-called “battleground states” the billionaire-backed Everytown Action Fund wants to flip: Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Texas, and Wisconsin. This list has been expanded with the addition of Ohio since the campaign was originally announced in early April.
This week’s emails are also asking for donations to help fund the effort, even though Everytown is supported by anti-gun billionaire, and former Democrat presidential candidate Michael Bloomberg.
Here’s what they plan to do with the dough:
- Hire organizers focused on registering voters in key battleground states
- Establish virtual field offices, where students will gather to strategize how to meet voter registration goals
- Pay for cutting edge organizing tools and technology for our virtual field offices
- Train student volunteers in relational organizing, which involves leveraging people in their peer networks and encouraging them to vote. This organizing method has been proven to be more effective than traditional canvassing, allowing volunteers to register their friends, family, classmates, and acquaintances — all online
- Develop online voter registration ads designed specifically for young people
By the time the email message finishes, these new voters are being referred to as “young leaders.”
Whether this campaign is successful may depend upon how well the Second Amendment community can mount an effective education effort.
