It appears the anti-gun nonprofit 97Percent has returned, although there have been massive internal changes and it’s far less now than it used to be. We haven’t heard much from them since they plagiarized photos of top female shooters to gaslight the public into believing they were not an anti-gun group.
97Percent’s one time executive director, Elizabeth Troye—once a senior advisor to Vice President Mike Pence—has been scrubbed from the group’s website.
In her place is Christopher Carita, an ex-cop who just last year was denied a disability pension by Fort Lauderdale’s Police and Firefighter Pension Board by a 4-3 vote. Apparently, a majority of the board members didn’t believe Carita suffered from PTSD, because his application didn’t meet the criteria for being “service connected, permanent and total.”
Carita’s takeover appears to be solely to increase support for his current gig, which is holding classes on “red flag” laws, which he calls Extreme Risk Protection Orders, or ERPOs. Carita, it should be pointed out, is a huge ERPO proponent, even though they’re only law in 21 states. Other than advocating for Carita’s classes and workshops, 97Percent’s website has, for now, remained mostly the same.
97Percent took its name from a long debunked Quinnipiac poll that falsely claimed 97% of Americans supported mandatory background checks…a claim the media loved to repeat. The group dismissively calls the remaining three percent “loud voices who have crowded out conversation and prevented collaboration between gun owners and non-gun owners.”
For some reason, 97Percent has never addressed the problems associated with polling gun owners, including our unwillingness to tell strangers there are firearms in our homes—especially over the phone. Instead, the group claimed it focuses on policies that both gun owners and non-gun owners support. Both sides, the group says, share the common goal of keeping our communities safe.
But even despite its new executive director, research has shown that 97Percent is nothing more than a run-of-the-mill anti-gun organization, overseen by a board of hardcore anti-gun zealots.
Here are some of 97Percent’s policy stances . . .
- 97Percent has supported an “assault weapon” ban.
- 97Percent has supported a standard-capacity magazine ban.
- 97Percent has supported a bump-stock ban.
- 97Percent has supported expanded red-flag laws.
- 97Percent has supported permits to carry firearms.
- 97Percent has supported permits to purchase firearms.
- 97Percent has supported permits to possess firearms.
- 97Percent has supported the loss of Second Amendment rights upon conviction of a “violent misdemeanor.”
- 97Percent has supported mandatory storage laws, which would lead to mandatory home inspections by police.
- 97Percent has supported mandatory background checks, without acknowledging they would lead to mandatory firearm registration and the creation of a national gun registry.
- 97Percent claims the Second Amendment is “overprotected.”
- 97Percent claims “rapid fire guns” are not used for hunting or home defense but doesn’t define the term.
- 97Percent claims popular semi-automatic firearms are “weapons of war.”
- 97Percent claims constitutional carry results in increased homicide rates.
- 97Percent’s advisory board is stocked with radical anti-gun extremists, including a former president of the Brady campaign.
Carita in charge
According to his group’s website, Carita claims he has “six years of experience in Threat Response and Extreme Risk Protection Order Implementation, and 10 years in Criminal Investigations in his 20-year law enforcement career.”
“Christopher earned his Master of Public Health with a focus on violence prevention as a BAHI Fellow at Johns Hopkins University and currently advises at the National ERPO Center on implementation. He is also a DHS Master Trainer for Behavioral Threat Assessment and Management,” the website states.
During one of his training videos, Carita claimed his group has a “strong focus on bringing gun owners into policy discussions.”
However, Carita did not respond to phone calls, texts or emails sent via his website, so there’s at least one gun owner he doesn’t want to bring into any policy discussion. Also, his website’s “contact us” and “media inquiries” buttons have both been disconnected.
“Most gun owners agree ERPOs are good,” he said in the video. “An ERPO is a valuable tool—a court order that prevents someone from possessing or purchasing firearms.”
Most gun owners view them as just another way for the government to unconstitutionally seize their firearms. I don’t know one gun owner who actually believes “ERPOs are good.”
Carita claims ERPOs can change law enforcement’s longstanding traditional role.
“An ERPO is a shift for law enforcement, from pure enforcement to prevention,” he said in the video.
Carita has already written several anti-gun stories, which the traditional media has picked up. Just last year, he wrote that Florida’s open-carry ruling “put Florida law enforcement in a tough spot.” He also created a Florida Risk Protection Order working group on LinkedIn. Currently, it has a total of nine members. Including Carita.
Anti-gun board of directors
Anyone who believes 97Percent isn’t an anti-gun advocacy group in sheep’s clothing needs only to look at their board of directors, which hasn’t changed much since the scandal.
Board member Richard Aborn served as president of the Center to Prevent Handgun Violence and as president of Handgun Control Inc., which became the Brady Campaign. According to Aborn’s bio, “He was a principal strategist behind the passing of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act as well as the Federal Assault Weapons Ban.”
Board members John Goodwin and Abra Belke were both federal lobbyists for the National Rifle Association…until they broke with the NRA. Goodwin has since become a go-to anti-gun resource for the legacy media.
An official with the National Shooting Sports Foundation said board members Congressmen Steve Israel and Seth Moulton, “never stood to protect the Second Amendment rights. Just the opposite.”
Board member Ketch Secor, founder of the Old Crow Medicine Show band, wrote a guest essay for the The New York Times titled: “Country Music Can Lead America Out of its Obsession with Guns.”
“It’s time for country music makers to use their platforms to speak candidly to their conservative audiences,” Secor wrote. “Our outrage needs to move from the green room to center stage.”
Board member Michael Wear served in the White House during President Barack Obama’s first term and was in charge of religious outreach for Obama’s re-election campaign. He is extremely anti-gun.
In 2021, after the Texas House passed a constitutional carry bill, board member Mark McKinnon took to Twitter to vent . . .
In 2022, McKinnon coauthored a guest column with Aborn that was published by The Hill, which actually claimed gun owners want more gun control.
Takeaways
As we said in a previous story, 97Percent leadership will never have the conversation with gun owners they claim they want as long as the group advocates for “assault weapons” bans, magazine bans and capacity limits, bump-stock bans, expanded red-flag confiscation, mandatory permits to purchase, carry and possess firearms, mandatory storage laws or expanded background checks.
So after everything, 97Percent remains nothing more than a second-rate anti-gun advocacy group, regardless of who’s in charge.
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This story is part of the Second Amendment Foundation’s Investigative Journalism Project and is published here with their permission.
Another left wing violent nazi: Federal Authorities Arrest Antifa Terrorist Who Threatened ICE Agents.
ht* tps://townhall.com/tipsheet/amy-curtis/2026/02/05/minnesota-antifa-arrest-n2670744
All anti-gun people are ‘broken toys’ in some aspect, and they all have an amount of mental illness obsession, and they all are dishonest, and they all are confirmation biased, and they all are irrational, and they all seek to control others, and they all create narratives that lack basic understanding of the subject, and they all have a hidden nefarious agenda and use their anti-gun advocacy to mask it and use as a stepping stone towards their hidden agenda. All anti-gun people are like this, just some more obvious about it than others.
But the only difference with 97percent is they have a web site.