If you buy a firearm at the local sporting goods store, pawn shop, or other licensed gun seller, you have to submit to a background check. It doesn’t usually take very long, and it’s essentially filling out a form plus a phone call to the FBI’s NICS system to make sure that you’re not a felon or other person who ought not own a firearm. The screening could probably use a database upgrade and a tech upgrade to be able to handle a higher call volume, but it basically works. You also have to go through the background check if you buy a gun off the internet, at Gunbroker.com or similar site.
President Obama wants background checks expanded, so that even if you buy a gun from a private citizen who does not make their living selling firearms, you would have to submit to a background check. He and others sympathetic to increasing gun control cite a statistic that on its face sounds alarming: That 40% of all gun purchases in the US happen among private citizens and therefore outside the background check system. That’s the so-called “gun show loophole,” which gets touted even though the vast majority of sales that happen at gun shows involve licensed dealers and, therefore, background checks.
Well, John Fund took a look at the alarming 40% stat. There’s less to it than meets the eye.
The dubious statistic of guns that avoided background checks — which is actually 36 percent — comes from a small 251-person survey on gun sales two decades ago, very early in the Clinton administration. Most of the survey covered sales before the Brady Act instituted mandatory federal background checks in early 1994.
If that alone didn’t make the number invalid, the federal survey simply asked buyers if they thought they were buying from a licensed firearms dealer. While all Federal Firearm Licensees do background checks, only those perceived as being FFLs were counted. Yet, there is much evidence that survey respondents who went to the smallest FFLs, especially the “kitchen table” types, had no idea that the dealer was actually “licensed.” Many buyers seemed to think that only “brick and mortar” stores were licensed dealers, and so the survey underestimating the number of sales covered by the checks.
Another reason for the high number is that it includes guns transferred as inheritances or as gifts from family members. Even President Obama’s background proposal excludes almost all of those transfers.
If you look at guns that were bought, traded, borrowed, rented, issued as a requirement of the job, or won through raffles, 85 percent went through Federal Firearm Licensees and would have been subject to a background check. Only 15 percent would have been transferred without a background check.
More at the link. It also turns out that when the background check system flags a buyer as a potential problem, it’s almost always a case of mistaken identity. If we task non-professionals with running the checks, we may end up increasing the number of false positives.
We cannot have a mature national conversation about all of this when one side can’t even get their terminology straight and keeps resorting to bogus statistics to make their case. Anyone who knows the difference between a clip and a magazine, and who knows that no sane military would send soldiers into battle armed with the AR15 because it is not truly a military weapon, can’t take the other side’s honesty at face value. When they go on about how awful and powerful semiautomatic weapons are because their clips hold too many bullets, they sound like idiots.
I saw some BS about a year ago that correlated background check statistics to ATF firearm sales statistics and drew the conclusion that most sales were done without background checks ie.,’gun show loophole sales’.
Aside from the idiocy that thinks that dealers need not do BG checks at gun shows, they ignored the fact that concealed weapon and firearm purchase permits in many states are an alternative to the background check and would result in a firearm sale without a BG check performed.
It wouldn’t surprise me if some were doing that again.
There are, we are told, at least 300 million legally sold firearms in this country. That includes whatever percentage has allegedly been sold without “background checks.” Call it 40% of the total of legally-sold weapons for the sake of argument/convenience.
If “background checks” made any difference, we would find that an overwhelming number—or at least a significant percentage—of the guns used in “gun violence” as decried by the President and his acolytes would be guns that had been sold without a “background check.” Yet, as I understand it, “gun violence” is overwhelmingly committed by people using illegal weaponry—which is to say, weaponry for which no “background check” would ever be performed, no matter how tough the standard, because it was acquired illegally. Nor is there any statistic I am aware of which shows that there is a greater incidence of misuse of guns acquired legally but without a “background check” than for guns acquired legally with one.
On that basis alone—whether or not there is actually a “loophole”—there is not only no reason to ramp up the background checks; there seems to be little reason to have them in the first place.
This! Plus 1,000!
Buzz, you should be cited for possession and operation of a brain without authorization.
Obama is the nation’s Barney Stinson. He’s got women drooling all over him and he lies without shame to get whatever he wants.
Since the federal government has decided that the rights secured under the Second Amendment can only be exercised with federal oversight, permission and background check, and in some cases waiting periods….
I therefore suggest that any scribe who wants to work for newspapers must likewise be fingerprinted, have their background checked, have their names and addresses placed in a publicly accessible directory, have to wait at least 7 business days before any article they print can be published, and must apply for the proper documentation prior to taking up the career of journalism.
The newspapers should likewise have to file the appropriate applications with the federal government and get an FPL (Federal Publishing License) prior to publishing a single copy of their newspaper to the public.
If either Journolist – oops, excuse me, journalist – or FPL licensee newspaper improperly fill out any paperwork, even down to abbreviating the word “street” as “ST” instead of writing it out, then that journalist or newspaper should be subject to immediate revocation of their respective licenses and face criminal charges.
Good faith intentions to abide by the law should not be considered a viable defense against any charges.
Content – the insides of the paper – should have to pass strictly enforced content regulations so as not to unnecessarily disturb the public with anything inside that would upset the neighbors.
Given the propensity for copycat killers to perform subsequent rampages after the violent act is glamorized in newspapers, I believe this to be a reasonable and common sense regulation of that supposed right.
After all, it’s just freedom of speech – and as we’re being informed, no right is absolute.
No importation of newspapers except for sporting purposes.
Don’t forget that no word shall exceed 7 (seven) letters.
I’ve said this a million times. If there’s to be an open and honest debate, then it needs to be honest. The left anti gun/anti civil rights establishment will never tell the truth. Their you tube channels have comments blocked, they block you from their facebook page if you make honest common sense and logical arguments and they distort the facts and are dihonest when you show their lies.
There’s nothing to debate. The Second Amendment means exactly what it says. Neither the feral government nor the states have the power or authority to infringe the right of the people to keep and bear arms.
Everything else is leftist extremist sniveling and whining.