There has been a lot of hubbub in the United States about taxpayer funds and mismanagement. Lots of accusations of money laundering, scams, and waste of taxpayer cash are floating around right now. It’s the government, so I tend to assume they are wasting our money. I’ve followed the stories at a surface level, and it eventually got me thinking: have gun control groups received taxpayer funding of any kind?
There is a website called Data Republican, which is most certainly biased. That’s where I started I ran the names of the big gun control groups out there and got an immediate hit when I searched Sandy Hook Promise. There are two groups associated with Sandy Hook Promise that took in a little over two million dollars. There is the Sandy Hook Promise Foundation and the Safe and Sound Sandy Hook Initiative.
Taxpayer Funds and Anti-Gun Groups
The Sandy Hook Promise Foundation received 1.4 million dollars. The Safe and Sound Sandy Hook Initiative received almost 750,000 dollars in taxpayer funds. To be clear, the website is biased, and I wasn’t going to trust it right off the bat. I don’t like most political websites, so I wanted to verify outside of Data Republican.
How does one do that? Well, you use the internet to become a five-minute expert. I became a five-minute, or really closer to ten-minute, expert on nonprofit finances. I really wanted to figure out what disclosures to look for. Nonprofits are required to put out a ton of paperwork regarding their finances and make it available to the public.
Image via CNN
It turns out most of the websites promising you this information want you to pay for a subscription. The government websites are God-awful, and I want to investigate how much we paid web designers for these websites. If it’s more than ten bucks and a hamburger, we need to investigate that.
Luckily, you can just go to the Sandy Hook Initiative website and find their financials going back to 2016. I might despise the anti-civil rights stance of the organization, but I appreciate the transparency. Their 990 forms are well-maintained and easy to read. I wanted to provide a little table.
The Table of Truth
2016 – No Taxpayer Funds.
2017 – No Taxpayer Funds.
2018 – $162,389 Taxpayer Funds
2019 – $133,347 Taxpayer Funds
2020 – $570,687 Taxpayer Funds
2021 – $680,431 Taxpayer Funds
2022 – $519,843 Taxpayer Funds
2023 – $1,417,049 Taxpayer Funds
2024 – $1,396,238 Taxpayer Funds
What Were These Funds For?
The organization received 4.8 million dollars of taxpayer funds. What did this funding pay for? You can’t really find where these government grants went. It’s not reported, or at least it’s not on the 990 form that I could find.
I want to be completely fair. I might be a hack, but unlike most ‘journalists’ I’m not intentionally a hack. The Sandy Hook Promise does rally for gun control efforts, but they also seem to aim to reduce social isolation and encourage kids to be kind. They have an anonymous tip line for kids to attempt to report potentially harmful behavior, including threats of violence, suicide, etc.
If the money is being used for kids to learn to be kind enough to report a threat they see on Snapchat or maybe a cry for help from a fellow student, I wouldn’t be upset. On the split side, if that money is being used to fund gun control and fight against my civil rights, then we have a pretty big problem.
Taxpayer funds should not be allotted to fund anti-rights legislation or to fund anti-gun politicians. To hell with that. I think, as taxpayers, we deserve answers. Where and how is this money being spent? I plan to become a thirty-minute expert soon enough, and maybe I can dig out answers. If the readership has answers or guidance, please feel free to submit tips so we can work together to figure out where our money is going.
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