Everytown Tries to Distance Itself From Activist Who Falsely Claimed to Be School Shooting Survivor

When gun control activists with Everytown for Gun Safety and Students Demand Action held a rally at the Kentucky state capitol in February to push for new restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms, one of the speakers captivated the small crowd of anti-gunners with his moving story about surviving a mass shooting at his Pennsylvania high school. 

As it turns out, however, what Calvin Polachek told the crowd was an outright lie. He invented the school shooting and his self-proclaimed trauma, and now Everytown is scrambling to distance themselves from the man they put in front of a microphone. 

Polachek “is not an active volunteer with Moms Demand Action or Students Demand Action, and we are deeply disappointed that someone would exploit the tragic, lived experience of many to use our platform to share a story that was not true,” Sarah Boland Heine, the senior director of communications for Everytown, said in a Wednesday statement. The Lantern reached out to Moms Demand Action, which is part of the Everytown gun safety group network, after receiving numerous messages from people who said they were classmates or relatives of Polachek and that the shooting never happened

“Calvin reached out to our Kentucky chapter, shamefully lied to our volunteers and shared a tragic story that we later learned was not true,” Heine said. “This is an affront to the countless survivors of gun violence who show extraordinary courage every day by reliving their darkest moments in service of the fight to end our country’s gun violence crisis. We are revisiting our guidance to our grassroots networks in an effort to ensure this never happens again.” 

Did anyone at Everytown even try to vet Polachek’s story? According to the Republican Herald newspaper in Pennsylvania, the gun control activist claimed that eleven students, including his brother and best friend, were murdered during a shooting at Dallas High School in 2017. As the paper notes, that would have been one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history. Did the Everytown volunteeers who heard Polachek’s lies just assume that they were true even though they’d never heard of a shooting at Dallas High School? And if Polachek wasn’t an “active volunteer”, then how did he land the speaking gig? Was Everytown just so eager to put a victim in front of a microphone that everyone associated with the anti-gun rally just decide that there was no need to do their due diligence? 

Polachek’s declined to speak to the press since he’s been outed as an abject liar, so we don’t know what motivated him to tell his tall tale. I won’t hazard a guess about what led him to tell such brazen lies, though I do hope he comes clean at some point. I’m far more interested in learning how and why Everytown was so eager to give Polachek a platform… as well as the reaction from the Kentucky lawmakers who were lied to by the anti-2A activists. Everytown’s credibility was shredded long ago as far as I’m concerned, but legislators and friendly media will hopefully now realize that the group and its mouthpieces shouldn’t be taken seriously at all, or at the very least, need to be fact-checked at every turn.