The Blaze
At a recent Senate hearing, Baltimore County Police Chief James Johnson went so far as to say, “Allowing 40 percent of those acquiring guns to bypass background checks is like allowing 40 percent of airline passengers to board a plane without going through airport security.”As we said last time this popped up in the news, you could call it 30% or even 20% and the argument for background checks is the same.
What gun control proponents never say, though, is that this oft-repeated statistic is based on stale data that was grossly exaggerated even when it was fresh.
As The Washington Post has pointed out, this 40 percent figure comes from a 1997 report by the National Institute of Justice, a research agency within the Department of Justice, and was based on a telephone survey sample of just 251 people who acquired firearms in 1993 and 1994. This was years before the NICS system went into effect. Of the 251 participants, 35.7 percent said that they didn’t or “probably” didn’t obtain their gun from a licensed firearms dealer. Because the margin of error was +/– 6 percentage points, it was rounded up to 40 percent, although it could just as easily and legitimately have been rounded down below 30 percent.
This is the issue which separates the honest and reasonable people from the fanatics. Wayne La Pierre has left his minions without a proper response on this one. All he says is "criminals won't obey," which is one of the stupidest arguments around.
This is the litmus test for true gun rights fanaticism-
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