Everytown Wants to Teach Hunters About Gun Safety
Everytown Wants to Teach Hunters About Gun Safety
Everytown for Gun Safety has rolled out a new online offering it calls “Gun Safety for Hunters,” part of its TRAIN SMART program. The pitch leans on a single study and a lineup of first-name-only instructors, and both fall apart under scrutiny.
Anyone who’s sat through a real hunter-safety course knows what the good version looks like. For a lot of us, it meant a parent tagging along, a trip to the range, and instructors from the National Rifle Association walking students through the fundamentals. The NRA has been at this for 154 years and has trained millions. Safety was always the point.
The study doing the heavy lifting
Everytown’s course rests on a 2024 paper, “Deer Hunting Season and Firearm Violence in US Rural Counties,” authored by Patrick Sharkey, PhD, of Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs; Juan Camilo Cristancho, BA, of UC Irvine; and Daniel Semenza, PhD, of the New Jersey Gun Violence Research Center at Rutgers.
The authors claim deer hunting is tied to a substantial jump in firearm violence. Everytown runs with a headline stat, stating on its TRAIN SMART website that “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.”
Here’s the problem. The researchers pulled their numbers from the Gun Violence Archive, a source repeatedly criticized for inflated figures. The GVA counts any incident where four or more people are killed or even slightly wounded as a mass shooting. By that math, the GVA logged 417 mass shootings in 2019. The FBI, using a tighter definition, counted 30.
Instructors without last names
The course is taught online by the same eight instructors Everytown uses across TRAIN SMART. None list last names, credentials, or where they trained.
The reach is thin. According to Everytown, only 700 people have completed any of its firearms training courses.