Everytown’s Smoking Gun Claims DOJ Opposition to Gun Ban Is About Helping ‘Gun Industry’

It’s no surprise that Everytown for Gun Safety isn’t happy with the Trump administration taking the position that bans on AR-15s and other centerfire semi-automatic rifles are unconstitutional. If the Viramontes case was playing out at the Supreme Court during the Biden administration, the DOJ would either be silent or would be siding with those defending the bans.

But it’s still amusing to me that Everytown refuses to consider the possibility that the DOJ’s current stance is based on the understanding that the Second Amendment protects the right to keep and bear arms in common use. Instead, writer Greg Lickenbrock claims the DOJ’s recent amicus brief in Viramontes “shows how far the Trump administration will go to help the gun industry.”

In its filing, the Trump administration not only sided with the gun lobby to attack commonsense gun safety laws but also echoed many of its same arguments.

The filing is the latest effort by the Trump administration to unravel gun laws and open new markets for deadly weapons, often working hand-in-glove with the gun industry. For example, the Department of Justice has filed lawsuits challenging state bans on assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, settled lawsuits with companies that make AR-15s deadlier, allowed a lapse in National Firearms Act (NFA) enforcement regarding silencers, and announced over 30 rule changes through the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to deregulate the gun industry.

Lickenbrock forgot (or ignored) the DOJ’s lawsuits challenging lengthy delays in processing concealed carry permit applications, the sky-high fees being charged in San Jose, the “handgun roster” in Massachusetts, and many of the “gun-free zones” imposed by Montgomery County, Maryland. Of course, Lickenbrock probably believes (or at least wants his readers to believe) that those efforts too are all about goosing gun sales and have nothing to do with safeguarding a fundamental civil right.

Ironically, groups like Everytown and their anti-gun allies in state legislatures that have done a great job of increasing gun sales. Just this year we’ve seen huge spikes in sales in Virginia, Colorado, and Rhode Island ahead of new gun control measures taking effect. Those laws aren’t meant to aid the gun industry, obviously, but they’ve still helped to sell a lot of firearms over the past few months, which in turn bolsters the argument that these arms are in common use and are protected by the Second Amendment.

Naturally, Lickenbrock takes issue with that as well.

In its amicus brief, the Department of Justice relies in part on flawed research findings as evidence that AR-15s are in “common use” and cannot be prohibited. For example, the Department cited a survey released days before briefs were due by a professor, William English, whose earlier work was criticized for — among other things — having “undisclosed ties to pro-gun interests.” English’s new research claims that roughly a quarter of gun owners own AR-15s. However, the new survey appears to suffer from many of the same flaws as his prior one; it was not peer-reviewed, does not disclose how respondents were recruited, and primes respondents to answer in certain ways.

English’s work is a survey, for crying out loud. Why would it need to be peer reviewed? Do we ignore the findings from Gallup because Pew didn’t sign off on the other firm’s polling methodology?

As for the “undisclosed ties to pro-gun interests,” English served as an expert witness in at least four lawsuits from 2018 to 2020. If that’s enough to discount someone’s research, then I guess that’s enough to discredit Saul Cornell, Robert Spitzer, and the other expert witnesses used by Everytown Law.

The Department of Justice also cited figures from the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF), the gun industry’s trade association, estimating that millions of “modern sporting rifles” — a term that the NSSF created for assault weapons like AR-15s — have been produced since 1990. But as discussed here, there is a stark difference between how many assault weapons have been made and how many are currently owned by civilians. The NSSF’s production figures do not distinguish between military, police, or civilian firearms and appear to include those in the hands of prohibited owners, such as criminals and domestic abusers, and those that have been illegally trafficked.

Sweet baby Robert Moses Browning! Is there really a “stark difference” between the number of guns produced and the number of guns sold, especially when we’re looking at a period of almost 40 years? Hardly.

More importantly, if groups like Everytown dispute the figures that NSSF and English have come up with, why haven’t they conducted any research of their own to figure out how many AR-style firearms are in the hands of lawful owners?

My guess is it’s because the gun control activists know that whatever number they come up with, it’s still going to show that these arms are commonly owned and are rarely used in crimes.

Lickenbrock concludes his piece by claiming it “cannot be argued… that assault weapons have become the weapon of choice for the perpetrators of the country’s most horrific mass shootings.”

Actually, it can be. The FBI’s latest report on active shooting incidents found that handguns were used about twice as often as long guns. Lickenbrock might argue that he said the “most horrific mass shootings”, not the entirety of active shooting incidents, but I think that would be horrifically insensitive to those who’ve lost loved ones or survived a mass shooting that doesn’t make his Top 10 list.

Everytown has promoted the idea that AR-15s are the weapons of choice for mass shooters for years, regardless of what the data actually shows. It almost seems like they’re encouraging deranged individuals to use semi-automatic long guns to commit mass shootings because it aids in their push to ban them.

Even if Everytown’s claims were true, it’s not a viable argument for banning AR-15s. Handguns are the weapon of choice for violent criminals, whether we’re talking about active shooters, home invaders, carjackers, or gang members. The Supreme Court has already said a handgun ban is off the table because those arms are also commonly used by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes. The same is true of AR-15s and other centerfire semi-automatic long guns.

We don’t ban something just because it can be criminally misused. If that was the standard, you wouldn’t be reading this on the Internet because we would have been prohibited from getting online long ago. And Everytown can argue about the numbers all it wants, but it can’t make millions of lawfully owned rifles uncommon by refusing to count them.