.png)
Everytown employees and activists in open revolt (but for different reasons)
- Sigiloso1776
- 2 hours ago
- 3 min read
To start off with, we have covered the long ongoing issues with Everytown For Gun Safety and “discrimination” in the past (here, here and here). Dating back almost a decade, management, according to current and past employees, has a rampant problem with racism, sexism and even alcoholism. Click the links in the last sentence for more, and keep reading, cuz that’s all still VERY relevant. But what’s going on with Everytown’s new grift (teaching “gun safety”)? Well…..
At first glance, Train SMART may seem like a pragmatic move in a country with more than 400 million firearms distributed (unevenly) among roughly 30 percent of adults. Maybe, the thinking goes, if gun ownership isn’t going away, the next best thing is to make it safer. For decades, hard-line “gun rights” organizations have dominated many large-scale training offerings, increasingly promoting an absolutist, deregulated vision of gun ownership while largely ignoring vital principles of safety and suicide prevention. By contrast, Train SMART’s marketing emphasizes exercises on de-escalation and secure storage, topics particularly important for gun owners who are interested in self- and family defense.
But for many of Everytown’s original supporters, especially survivors of gun violence, this move feels like a profound betrayal. Train SMART represents a major shift in focus at Everytown, founded in 2013 following the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in Newtown, Connecticut. Originally, the organization defined itself by a simple, evidence-based premise: Fewer guns in fewer hands means fewer deaths. Through its grassroots partners in its two major subsidiary groups, Moms Demand Action and Students Demand Action, Everytown built a massive movement grounded in public grief, unyielding advocacy, and public health–centered research. It quickly became the largest, most highly resourced organization in the effort to reduce gun violence. Its expanding network of volunteers—most of them parents, educators, and survivors—showed up in state houses and school board meetings across the country, advocating for commonsense firearm regulations designed to save lives. These voices insisted that our gun-violence epidemic could not be solved with more guns. Now these same supporters are watching the movement’s flagship organization enter the gun training business.
Everytown is shifting their organization in order to remain relevant and also to “capture” unsuspecting people that don’t know what their ultimate goal is: Gun control. But by shifting to “training”, their longtime advocates who demand gun control are getting tossed aside and told to fall in-line. Some examples from the article:
Many of Everytown’s most committed allies are those who have experienced gun violence in their communities: parents who lost children, spouses who lost partners, students who lost friends, towns devastated by mass shootings. For them, Everytown’s pivot signals that the group believes that guns are, after all, the solution to gun violence. Andy Parker, who lost his 24-year-old daughter to a shooting that took place on live television, writes on his Substack, Andy’s Fight, that Everytown has “pour[ed] millions into weapons training programs” while treating survivors as “props” and “expendable assets.” His grief, long a catalyst for activism, has curdled into disillusionment. “It’s about whether the billions behind Everytown will ever be used to honor the dead, protect the living, and fight for the change survivors have begged for.” He concludes, “Right now, the answer is clear: they’re failing.”
Similar reactions have spread within Everytown’s ranks. Skye Thietten, a former Michigan Everytown Be SMART leader and longtime Moms Demand Action volunteer, described her initial response as one of “shock” and “deep disappointment.” After eight years with the group, she says, she will no longer “put in [the] time for an organization that supports investment of any kind in the gun industry.” For Thietten, gun-violence prevention means “educating the public on how and why guns do not make any average individual or community safer” and advocating for reforms that save lives, instead of encouraging gun ownership.
It is GOOD for the 2A side that Everytown is shifting their strategy and crapping on their most devout anti-gun supporters. There’s more in the Slate article, so click the link to read more. With the shift in tactics (and going back to our earlier articles in the first paragraph of this piece), what’s the current mood amongst Everytown employees? Well, let’s head on over to Glassdoor and highlight a few reviews from current and former employees!
And another
How about another? Seems lots of employees have threatened to sue lol
More!
And more!
In order to remain relevant, Everytown had to switch tactics and burn their biggest activists/supporters, and through the years it’s been consistent that employees, especially minorities, are treated badly by management. Sounds like a very nice and trusting place to work, eh?