No One Should Take Everytown’s ‘Grades’ Seriously

Every year, the news feeds on Second Amendment-related topics get clogged with reports from various news outlets about how their state fared in Everytown’s annual grades. Did they get an “A,” an “F,” or something in between?

It’s easy to just roll our eyes at this, but it’s also important to understand something about these grades: They’re nothing but propaganda.

See, it’s not about how safe a state is, but what laws are in place.

Everytown recently released its 2026 list, and I feel dumber just for reading the report. But I decided to take one for the team, since now you won’t feel compelled to spend more than a few seconds on it.

“We compared gun policy across the country, scoring every state on the strength of its gun laws and comparing it with its rate of gun violence,” Everytown crowed in the report titled ‘Gun Polices Save Lives.’ “In states where elected officials have taken action to pass gun safety laws, fewer people die by gun violence. Choose a state to see how it stacks up on the 50 key policies, or explore a policy to see how much of the country has adopted it.”

From looking through the report, it’s easy to see that Everytown made its list of criteria so some states would finish high and others would finish low. It then used cherry-picked crime statistics to determine how a state’s “rate of gun violence” compares to that of other states.

In reality, Everytown just produces the ranking every year to try to push some of its pet anti-gun proposals, all of which would infringe upon the rights of lawful American gun owners.

Let’s understand that its comparison with a state’s “rate of gun violence” is actually a comparison to “gun deaths,” which is a statistic that lumps all firearm-related fatalities into one giant number, with no differentiation between homicides and suicides.

Gun control is a terrible method for preventing suicides as a whole, but also terrible for preventing suicides with a firearm. People who take their own lives with a gun have usually had that firearm for years. Few go and buy a gun just to take their own lives, which means they’re intentionally conflating gang warfare murders with people who decide to end their own lives rather than suffer with terminal cancer.

The two aren’t alike in the least beyond a firearm being used.

At the heart of things, though, Everytown’s grades aren’t about so-called gun violence. It’s about which policies a state has passed or already has in place. Do their policies align with what Everytown thinks should be on the books? The more of those measures in place, the higher the grade.

It’s not about safety so much as it’s about compliance. Does a state do what Everytown wants it to do? If so, they get a good grade.

And then the media latches onto those grades, reports them as if they’re some kind of wellness check on the state, and typically fails to note that the grades aren’t based on crimes, murders, or anything like that, only which laws are in place.

Everytown’s grades this next go-around won’t note, for example, that homicides and violent crime as a whole plummeted in 2025 despite more guns being on the streets. It’ll just hit states that won’t bend the knee with a bad grade, those that will with a good grade, and pretend those grades actually mean something.

Editor’s Note: The mainstream media continues to lie about gun owners and the Second Amendment. 

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