The Guardian: One in Five Americans Obtain Guns Without Background Checks

The Guardian reports that researchers have finally taken the time to update an often debunked statistic related to the number of firearms purchases are completed without a background check.

Just 22 percent of current gun owners who acquired a firearm within the past two years reported doing so without a background check, according to a new national survey by public health researchers at Harvard and Northeastern universities shared in advance with The Trace and The Guardian.

For years, politicians and researchers have estimated that as many as 40 percent of gun sales are conducted without a background check — a statistic based on an extrapolation from a 1994 survey. The new survey, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, found that the current proportion of gun transfers conducted without a background check is about half of the oft-cited figure.

That is almost the same percentage that the Washington Post found (21%) when the paper's Fact Checker gave President Obama three Pinocchio's in 2013 for repeating the 40% statistic. At that time the Post went back and asked the authors of a Police Foundation report to rerun their numbers to adjust for how people acquire firearms (purchases versus  “acquisitions” and “transactions,” which included trades, gifts etc.).  But the President, Hillary Clinton, and the gun ban lobby have continued to use the 40% number.

Could the lower number have something to do with why so few private sellers have taken advantage of voluntary background checks at Virginia gun shows since July?  Could it be there really is no "bazaar" of guns available for sale without background checks at gun shows?

The gun ban lobby is already adjusting their talking points in light of the lower numbers.

Philip Cook, a prominent gun violence researcher at Duke University who conducted the 1994 survey, says the new, smaller estimate does not undermine the argument that the U.S. needs a federal law instituting universal background checks on gun sales. In fact, he says, the finding that a smaller number of guns are acquired without background checks could be an advantage for supporters of stricter gun control laws.

“The headline is that we as a nation are closer to having a hundred percent of gun transactions with a background check than we might have thought,” says Cook. “So, it’s more attainable, and cheaper, to pass a universal requirement than it would be if 40 percent of transactions were still being conducted without these screenings.”

The new study is published in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

Obama Continues to Collect Pinocchios From Washington Post Fact Checker on Gun Comments

Anyone still questioning the impact that social media has had on the information available to the public need only look at today's Washington Post Fact Check on one comment that President Obama made during his executive actions announcement yesterday:

“The problem is some gun sellers have been operating under a different set of rules.  A violent felon can buy the exact same weapon over the Internet with no background check, no questions asked.”

—President Obama, remarks on gun proposals, Jan. 5, 2016

The Fact Checker’s inbox just about exploded after the president made this comment in introducing new guidance for background checks and gun-safety proposals.  Here’s just a sampling:

Can’t wait for “fact” “checkers” to go to town on this one! https://t.co/CErTynLsb4

— Mollie (@MZHemingway) January 5, 2016

@GlennKesslerWP wow what a lie from the whitehouse https://t.co/zxV9sf6fZW

— Steven (@ArlingtonSteve) January 5, 2016

Waiting for the fact check on this whopper … @PolitiFact @GlennKesslerWP https://t.co/jikK1niOWa

— kelley currie (@mackiesmama) January 5, 2016

While watching the speech, I had the VSSA Twitter feed open and folks like Katie Pavlich, Dana Loesch and Bob Owens also called out the President.  So, Kessler wasted no time in looking at what the President said and whether it was true.  After parsing Obama's use of the word "Internet" and what people may understand him to mean (recall Clinton's famous "depends on what the meaning of the word "is" is) the final verdict was Two Pinocchios:

We agree that Obama’s language is slippery and could be confusing to the average person who doesn’t know anything about FFLs and interstate requirements. There is nothing unique about the Internet; the laws governing private transactions and interstate sales are exactly the same. It’s the same as offering to sell a gun on a bulletin board, except the bulletin board is significantly larger. The Internet, and eletronic payment systems such as PayPal and Bitcoin, have certainly facilitated transactions that in the past would have been more difficult to arrange.

Obama erred in saying the rules are different for Internet sellers. They face the same rules as other sellers — rules that the administration now says it will enforce better.

Yesterday's speech was full of out right lies.  Even with Kessler's parsing what Obama may have actually meant by the word "Internet" it was nice to see the mainstream media point out the fact in this case.

Obama Gets Two Pinocchios for Claim that ‘States with the Most Gun Laws Tend to Have the Fewest Gun Deaths

Well this didn't take long.  The Washington Post Fact Checker has taken Obama's claim that states with the most gun laws have the fewest gun deaths and found it's not as simple as Obama would have us believe:

But this is also an issue about scope. Most gun deaths — more than 60 percent in 2013 — are actually suicides. The president made his remarks in the aftermath of the tragic shooting rampage at an Oregon community college, and so it’s a judgment call as to whether counting suicides is appropriate. After all, Obama wants to thwart mass shootings by enacting universal background checks aimed at people with criminal histories.

Some might argue that it is wrong to exclude suicides from the data, as less access to guns might result in fewer suicides. The data on that is mixed. Gun-related suicides might decline, but studies have shown little connection between suicides and access to guns. A 2004 report published by the National Academy of Sciences concluded that “some gun control policies may reduce the number of gun suicides, but they have not yet been shown to reduce the overall risk of suicide in any population.”

Japan, for instance, has among the world’s most-restrictive gun-control regimes — and yet also has among the world’s highest suicide rates, almost double the U.S. suicide rate.

As we will show below, the numbers change, sometimes dramatically, when suicides are not counted.

When the Post contacted the Administration to find out where they got the information for their claim, the "official" responding said it was based on a chart published by National Journal in August.  That chart calculated the number of gun-related deaths per 100,000 people by including all gun deaths, including homicides, suicides, accidental gun deaths and legal intervention involving firearms.  By doing so, according to the Post, the states at the top of the chart — Hawaii, Massachusetts, New York, Connecticut, Rhode Island and New Jersey — are listed as having tough restrictions, based on seven kinds of criteria. The states at the bottom — Alaska, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Arkansas and Wyoming — have virtually none of the these restrictions.  The Post went and extracted the suicides and their findings were quite different:

Alaska, ranked 50th on the National Journal list, moved up to 25th place. Utah, 31st on the list, jumped to 8th place. Hawaii remains in 1st place, but the top six now include Vermont, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Iowa and Maine. Indeed, half of the 10 states with the lowest gun-death rates turn out to be states with less-restrictive gun laws.

Meanwhile, Maryland — a more urban state — fell from 15th place to 45th, even though it has very tough gun laws. Illinois dropped from 11th place to 38th, and New York fell from 3rd to 15th.

This is not the first time that the Post has called out Obama for using the gun ban lobby's talking points. The first time was in April 2013 when he trotted out the oft repeated claim that 40% of gun sales are completed without a background check.

We wavered between Two and Three Pinocchios, but in the end settled on Two. Most of the states at the bottom appear to have less-restrictive gun laws even when calculated without suicides. So that’s an interesting data point. But the evidence is not as clear cut as the president claims.

The Post is much more diplomatic in their conclusion.  Most people would just say Obama is not being honest (i.e. lying).  But the Post simply calls it a classic situation of a politician exaggerating a study's conclusions to justify a policy.

Washington Post Gives Senator Murphy, Everytown Claim on School Shootings Four Pinocchios

The Washington Post Fact Checker has weighed in on that Everytown for Gun Safety claim that there has been a school shooting every week since Sandy Hook and it isn't good news for Bloomberg and his minions.  The Post decided to weigh in after Conn. U.S. Senator Chris Murphy repeated the claim on the floor of the U.S. Senate on June 24th, sparked by the church shooting in Charleston, S.C.

A version of this claim circulated after the June 2014 incident in Oregon in which a high school freshman armed with an assault rifle shot and killed a student and injured a teacher. President Obama and other gun-control advocates had said then that there had been at least 74 school shootings between Sandy Hook and the Oregon shooting.

The source for the claim then, and for Murphy’s recent statement, is a report by Everytown for Gun Safety, which describes itself as “a movement of Americans working together to end gun violence and build safer communities.”

That list included things like a police chase that ended on school property after hours as a "school shooting." The Post is not the first to rule that Everytown was playing fast and loose with the numbers but having one more source not known to be friendly to the right to keep and bear arms point this out doesn't hurt:

There are many ways to define school shooting. But applying the “reasonable person” standard, as is the standard at The Fact Checker, it is difficult to see how many of the incidents included in Everytown’s list — such as suicide in a car parked on a campus or a student accidentally shooting himself when emptying his gun and putting it away in his car before school — would be considered a “school shooting” in the context of Sandy Hook.

Lawmakers have a responsibility to check out the facts in the reports they use, especially ones that come from advocacy groups. If they are aware there are definitions that are disputed, or that are defined in other ways depending on who uses them, it is incumbent on lawmakers to clarify exactly what they are talking about and not mislead the public. In particular, lawmakers should rely more on official government statistics, such as from the FBI, rather than misleading metrics cobbled together by interest groups.

We wavered between Three and Four Pinocchios. But this is a definition of “school shooting” that was widely disputed a year ago, and lawmakers need to present information — especially for such a controversial topic as gun control — in a clear, responsible and accurate way. Murphy’s failure to do so tipped the rating to Four.

The Post would do well to take their own advice regarding checking the facts.  In 2014, they ran their story (which has been updated since it was originally posted) on the Everytown report without doing any fact checking.  I guess a year of hearing the numbers and seeing folks like CNN question the numbers made the Post decide to check the facts.  Any bets on whether anti-rights politicians will stop using this bogus statistic after this latest discrediting of Everytown's numbers?