John Lott: The truth on background checks

Judging on the few clicks this has gotten today so far, I’m bringing this down from the headlines to give it more view. This is important for several reasons, but mainly to expose the fraud behind the numbers the Democrats are using to push for universal background checks.

Remember back when Obama and the Democrats were pushing for Obamacare, they claimed that over 40 million Americans didn’t have health insurance because they couldn’t afford it or simply couldn’t get it? Well that number was found to be incredibly inflated (even including all 1l million illegals) and it turned out only 12 million or so actual Americans didn’t have health insurance that wanted it.

Well Democrats are doing the same thing all over again with faulty background check statistics and the lengths they’ve gone to inflate these numbers should astonish you. John Lott explains below:

NY POST – Schumer tells us that “48 percent of gun sales are made without a background check” and that background checks have “blocked 1.7 million prohibited individuals from buying a gun.” Both stats are just false.

On sales without a check, even the 40 percent figure that President Obama and others use is off. It’s obtained by rounding up of a 36 percent statistic that comes from the only study on this issue.

And that (small) study covered a 1991-94 period, most of which came before the Brady Act took effect on Feb. 28 1994, and for the first time required that all federally-licensed dealers perform checks.

There’s more: The researchers gave this number for all transactions, including family inheritances and gifts, not just “sales.” Count only guns that were bought, traded, borrowed, rented, issued as a job requirement or won through raffles, and 85 percent went through federally licensed gun dealers; just 15 percent would’ve been transferred without a background check.

(By the way, that survey also found that all gun-show sales went through federally licensed dealers. If Schumer et al. really trust the study, they should stop raging about the “gun show loophole.”)

Bottom line: It’s hard to believe that the percentage of sales without background checks is above single digits today.

On to Schumer’s second falsehood — the claim that checks have stopped 1.7 million prohibited sales. In fact, these were only “initial denials,” not people prevented from buying guns.

CONTINUE READING


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