A couple of days ago, I took some shots at Everytown for Gun Safety’s latest so-called research. I get annoyed at how many people seem to pretend this is actual research versus advocacy, but the media bites on every press release they send out, in part because they want it to be true so much, they never bother to ask probing questions.
I’ve personally dismantled a lot of these studies, and there are others who do it just as much and often do a better job than yours truly.
It’s important work, and it’s important that it be done in as many different venues as possible.
Over on X, for example, Second Amendment attorney Kostas Moros wrote a pretty long thread doing just that.
Everytown has new “research” claiming Stand Your Ground Laws (which it derides as “Shoot First” laws) are very bad.
Let’s take a quick look at what they have to say.
To begin with, it’s important to remember that the only thing Stand Your Ground does is make it so that there… pic.twitter.com/k8H8OGhiXC
— Kostas Moros (@MorosKostas) July 23, 2025
Post continues:
make it so that there is no duty to retreat. Every other element of self-defense must still be present to have a successful defense against criminal charges.
It does not mean you can “shoot first” unless you *reasonably* feared death or serious bodily injury, to yourself or to an innocent third party. Basically, this is Castle Doctrine (which Everytown also hates and tried to kill in California) applied everywhere.
The main benefit is that some antigun prosecutor who has lived a sheltered existence can’t second guess your actions in reasonable self defense by asking why you didn’t try to run away first when the meth head charged at you with a knife.
Of course, Everytown, like most anti-gun organizations, likes to reframe Stand Your Ground as something it’s not. They tend to pretend it’s just a way to excuse murder, which isn’t the case.
Moving on…
The substance of the paper starts off by being terribly misleading. They state that 21 states have rejected shoot first laws.
Which is true, 21 states don’t have such codified laws.
But many of these states do have Stand Your Ground through common law. Model jury instructions… pic.twitter.com/M0W2xKe70Q
— Kostas Moros (@MorosKostas) July 23, 2025
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But many of these states do have Stand Your Ground through common law. Model jury instructions for example incorporate Stand Your Ground into the justifiable homicide instruction, CALCRIM No. 505:
“[A defendant is not required to retreat. He or she is entitled to stand his or her ground and defend himself or herself and, if reasonably necessary to pursue an assailant until the danger of (death/great bodily injury/) has passed. This is so even if safety could have been achieved by retreating.]”
Bingo.
California is not a duty-to-retreat state, surprisingly. That doesn’t mean some prosecutor might not try to press charges just the same, but as Moros notes, common law has it covered.
In reality, it is non-SYG states that are the extreme outlier at this point. Duty to retreat is basically a relic only surviving in New England and a couple of other stubborn states.
Even several gun control bastions like California have long had SYG, dating back to 19th century… pic.twitter.com/ZxaYTiOXBc
— Kostas Moros (@MorosKostas) July 23, 2025
So basically, the reality is that despite Everytown’s claims, those states with a duty to retreat are very rare, all things considered. That alone invalidates much of their “data” right then and there.
However, Moros points out something else that’s worth considering.
Here, note the use of the word “homicide” instead of “murder.”
Everytown is again trying to trick its readers. Every murder is bad (aside from wrongful convictions), but not every homicide is bad.
Remember, killing someone is always technically considered “homicide.” The most… pic.twitter.com/EhgX4VFYzE
— Kostas Moros (@MorosKostas) July 23, 2025
Post continues:
Remember, killing someone is always technically considered “homicide.” The most perfect, unquestionable self-defense case is still classified as homicide. But it is excused because it is justified as self-defense.
So when Everytown says “Shoot First” laws have added 700 homicides, that means nothing without more context. They are trying to insinuate these are 700 cases where someone killed another in cold blood and got away with it, when in reality these may mostly be legitimate self-defense cases. If they are, I don’t mind there being 700. Hell, if self-defense is needed, let there be 7,000.
Exactly. If these are self-defense cases, it invalidates the claim that somehow, Stand Your Ground laws are making us less safe. The fact that they didn’t parse out self-defense shootings means that they were trying to inflate the numbers, which means we might well find that actual murders dropped significantly.
From this “research,” we simply can’t tell, which is likely the point.
He also dismantles their claim that Stand Your Ground laws change what’s considered self-defense, which is absolute nonsense, and delves into claims about prosecution and other things. You should take a look because it’s a long but good thread.
Moros focuses primarily on the legal side of things, which definitions would fall into, and he uses his legal knowledge to rip many of the claims apart, including how many times people are prosecuted for self-defense cases where it’s clearly justified. In fact, he invokes the Kyle Rittenhouse case as a prime example. Anyone with eyes could see he was acting in self-defense, and yet he was prosecuted just the same.
Everytown, however, has no reason to publish research that does anything but work to advance the gun control narrative. They’re a gun control organization. They started as a gun control organization. They weren’t some research body that simply followed the evidence to guide their later advocacy. They started researching stuff to justify what they already wanted.
They shouldn’t be treated as legitimate researchers because they’re not. They’re propagandists with a really badly applied veneer of being researchers.
The things that Moros talks about above, or that I talked about, or the things that others will bring up, all serve to show this “study” isn’t a valid finding, that this is nothing but manipulated data that attempts to convince people that a lifesaving policy is really a danger to us all.
Don’t let them get away with it.
Editor’s Note: Anti-gun billionaires like Michael Bloomberg will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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