Happy Birthday, Armed With Reason!

After one year, we've only just begun our battle against America's gun epidemic

Apr 22, 2024

Photo: Dean Calma / IAEA

GVPedia launched this Substack on April 10, 2023. So this week we’ll be celebrating our first year, highlighting what we’ve accomplished so far and what’s coming.

For six years, GVPedia had established itself as one of the most trusted informational spaces in the gun violence prevention movement. Led by founder Devin Hughes, we’ve made it our mission to provide ready access to solid academic research and high-quality data on gun violence.

With Armed With Reason, we look to further that mission, with an emphasis on busting the myths of the gun lobby and uplifting the stories of survivors and activists who work hard to fight our country’s increasingly fatal gun epidemic.

One of our proudest accomplishments so far was our series, “The Defensive Gun Use Lie and the Gun Lobby’s Firehose of Falsehood” — an expansive, 12-part dig into the history and malady of the gun industry and its constant use of specious data and fear tactics to increase profits, while casually ignoring the real life consequences of their misinformation and greed.

Check out the links to the series below, and watch for more anniversary action this week.

The Defensive Gun Use Lie and the Gun Lobby’s Firehose of Falsehood

Part 1 - How decades of shoddy research, lax academic oversight, marketing, and outright lies fatally warped America’s gun culture

Part 2 - Uncovering the myth of widespread defensive gun use

Part 3 - The problem with surveys of statistically rare events

Part 4 - Comparing defensive gun use and cocaine

Part 5 - Most reported defensive gun uses are offensive uses

Part 6 - An alternative to Kleck’s numbers: The National Crime Victimization Survey

Part 7 - The National Academy of Sciences 2013 Report

Part 8 - The Gun Violence Archive and national empirical data

Part 9 - Attempts to resurrect the widespread DGU myth

Part 10 - The CDC and DGUs: Pushing back on the widespread DGU myth

Part 11 - Defensive gun use is not more effective

Part 12 - Why the Defensive Gun Use myth matters

Thanks so much for joining in our fight for gun violence prevention by checking out our daily posts. If you haven’t yet, we encourage you to subscribe — it’s free, but we have pay tiers if you want to help us keep our mission alive.

And of course, if you find one of our articles interesting please press the heart button, leave a comment, and/or share it on social media. Every little bit helps. Thanks, and keep up the good fight!