Rolling out the BS
Lance Cooley sends us a link from Fox News that disputes the figures that the president is using to push his universal background check agenda. Apparently the president said something to give the impression that 40% of guns are sold with no background checks;
The oft-cited figure, it turns out, was pulled from a 1997 study done by the National Institute of Justice. In the study, researchers estimated about 40 percent of all firearm sales took place through people other than licensed gun dealers. The conclusion was based on data from a 1994 survey of 2,568 households. Of those, only 251 people answered the question about where they got their guns.
PolitiFact tracked down the co-author of the study, Duke University professor Philip Cook, and asked him if he thought the 40 percent estimate is accurate.
“The answer is I have no idea,” Cook reportedly told PolitiFact. “This survey was done almost 20 years ago.”
Even the Washington Post, through editorial tears, squeezed out three Pinocchios for the lie.
Two months ago, we were willing to cut the White House some slack, given the paucity of recent data. But the president’s failure to acknowledge the significant questions about these old data, or his slippery phrasing, leaves us little choice but to downgrade this claim to Three Pinocchios.
Yeah, well, anyone would know it was a lie, since only 25% of weapons sold at gun shows are done without background checks. I’ve gone through background checks for every single weapon that I own. I guess next time I shoot with Old Trooper and his Hillbilly Hunt Club in Minnesota, they’ll make me go through background checks again.
Category: Barack Obama/Joe Biden, Gun Grabbing Fascists
Oh! They caught Bodaprez in a LIE. He LIED! He LIED!!!
I’m hyperventilating. Cookie time.
Color me surprised. Really.
Whole issue is a f’ing joke. If you purchase from an FFL, you go through the back ground check. From a private party, no. Very much like making Doctors jump through hoops to write prescriptions, making a background check mandatory will just effect law abiding citizens, while the bad guys will continue to break the laws and get their drugs and guns on the black-market…
You damn right, Lilyea!!! We have standards, ya know! (cough, cough, bullshit, cough, cough)
Well, I have one rifle that I didn’t go through a background check for. MY folks bought it for me back in 1965, and they bought it from a family friend. Other than that, every weapon I own, I went through a background check.
But, I’m shocked, shocked, I tell you, that President Present would bend the truth, and his sycophants in the media would bend the truth to advance a political agenda. Next, someone will claim that Obama would stand on the bodies of dead children to advance that agenda.
So they’re basing their “facts” on a VOLUNTARY SURVEY with less than a 10 percent response rate?
Yeah, someone needs their nuts flattened for that, but don’t expect anyone in this administration to admit the figures they’re using are crap.
That’s the same problem with 50% of marriages end in divorce nonsense….some idiot looked at a single year and discovered that there were about half as many new divorces as new marriages and concluded that meant 50% of marriages end in divorce…without taking into account all the other people who were already married that year…. For instance in 2011 there were about 2.1 million marriages versus 877,000 divorces or about 40%…so someone determines that 40% of marriages end in divorce without considering there were 30 million married couples comprising 60 million people in 2011…877,000 divorces in a year that had 30 million couples married is hardly 40% ending in divorce. Too many “journalists” who are not well versed in statistical databases look at single event numbers and assume it correlates across all of history….not an accurate methodology. Old data such as that in the President’s comments also confounds those not able to parse statistical data. Historical data is contextually valid if a continuing data record is accurately maintained which in this case is not true. Once again numbers without meaning used in an attempt to provide context for a political agenda to give the appearance of a detriment that can only be rectified by legislation, when in reality, based on the real numbers, guns are safer than walking down the street or driving in your car. Statistically crime and violence have been decreasing in the absence of new legislation not because of it. Underlying reasons have not been clearly illuminated, but the fact remains we are safer now without any of the proposed or recently enacted legislation than at any time over the last 4 decades. But no one hear actually expects an honest discussion of the facts from the president or his party do they? They have shown a complete and total commitment to the avoidance of any factual representations of crimes, homicides, and current laws in an effort to achieve their goal of repealing the 2nd amendment through legislative efforts not enumerated in the constitution instead of the mandated amendment process which they know will fail. It is… Read more »
I have bought one gun at a gunshow without a background check, however it was a Winchester Model 1908 pump action .22LR. It was over 100 yrs old and worked like it was brand new.
Frankly, while the method to derive the figure is suspect as hell, I would not be terribly surprised to hear that 40% of guns are actually sold without background checks. I suspect most people who only own one or two guns tend to buy them from dealers of some sort more than peer-to-peer, but gun folks tend to do a lot of trading/word-of-mouth sales etc.
John (8) – sweet.
40%, 25% what’s the difference. 90% of statistics are made up 38 % of the time anyway
@9 I own a couple that I bought from friends or inherited. I bought a couple from gun shows but I don’t own them anymore; I sold them through dealers so the buyer completed the yellow peril.
Poor data makes bad policy. On the other hand, the NRA has been fighting attempts to improve data gathering because it might lead to registration. I would rather have poor data than registration but I wonder, can we improve the data without giving up the farm?
Theoretically if you expanded the instant background system without implementing transaction records (hence not a back-door registration scheme) I think many would be able to accept it. The problem is that people like Schumer have already called it a registration, so we can see there is NO intent to implement just background checks, but also to establish a registartion database. Historically, every country which has implemented registration databases (Australia, UK, Canada, etc) have used those databases within a few years to enforce confiscation. There is an opinion piece on Yahoo today holding up Australia as a model for the US: bans on any semi-automatic firearms of ANY sort, and mandatory “buy-backs” where regardless how expensive the weapon is, the owner got about $100.
All I have to say to all the talk about “Australia this, and UK that” is this: We ain’t Australia or the UK.
Old Trooper – so you think it’s OK to maintain registration databases and that the government would never use them to confiscate? I suspect you may not have understood my point if not – Australia and the UK are cautionary examples, not ideals to be emulated.
@Dave – so you are completel unaware that people in Dartmoor and Exmoor still go gun hunting in the fall and spring?
Old Trooper–it sure as shit ain’t for lack of trying on the libtards part.