5 Reasons You Shouldn't Believe
Everytown's State Rankings

The 'gun-control' group Everytown for Gun Safety releases an annual report ranking states on a scale from "National Leaders" to "National Failures," with, as you might expect, "National Failures" representing the freest states. Ultimately, the organization employs some oddly weighted criteria to determine that states with stricter gun laws have fewer firearm-related deaths.

The issue with that claim is that it is so provably false. Here are five reasons why you should take Everytown's rankings with a pound, not a grain, of salt.

1. Combining a bunch of different gun laws into one number isn't an accepted research practice.

John Lott, president of the Crime Prevention Research Center (CPRC), has been debunking annual reports like this for decades. Before Everytown, the Brady Campaign conducted a similar ranking using equally flawed measurements to obtain the results they desired.

"Lumping all the different gun-control numbers into one number is pretty arbitrary," Lott said in an earlier analysis. "Not only is there the issue of what gun-control laws to include, there is also the issue of how to weight them." .....