by
S.H. Blannelberry
Guns.com

Recently
by S.H. Blannelberry: Did
the NRA Make a Backdoor Deal To Not Oppose Universal Background Checks?

Everyone in
politics bends the truth. But some do it more than others. Here
is a list of five memes gun-control advocates continue to propagate
despite their dubious validity.

1.
40 Percent of Guns are Sold without Background Checks

From New York
City Mayor Michael Bloomberg to President Obama to Vice President
Biden, they’ve all mentioned the “40 percent” figure with respect
to the number of gun transactions that are conducted without a background
check.

“The law already
requires licensed gun dealers to run background checks, and over
the last 14 years that’s kept 1.5 million of the wrong people from
getting their hands on a gun, said President Obama during a speech
on Jan. 16, 2013.

“But it’s hard
to enforce that law when as many as 40 percent of all gun purchases
are conducted without a background check.”

In a previous
Guns.com article, I investigated this issue in-depth. What was
the conclusion? Well, if one accepts the findings of economist John
Lott Jr., then as he said in his write
up on the issue, “We don’t know the precise number today, but
it is hard to believe that it is above single digits.”

However,
if one believes that Lott is unfairly biased, that he leans too
far to the pro-gun side, then one can consider the Washington
Post’s analysis of that 40 percent figure:

In other
words, rather than being 30 to 40 percent (the original estimate
of the range) or “up to 40 percent” (Obama’s words), gun purchases
without background checks amounted to 14 to 22 percent. And since
the survey sample is so small, that means the results have a survey
caveat: plus or minus six percentage points.

2.
Gun ownership is on the decline in America

Almost every
pro-gun control advocate contends that gun ownership in the U.S.
is on the decline. And they all point to the same research to substantiate
that claim, the bi-annual General
Social Survey (GSS) conducted by the National Opinion Research
Center at the University of Chicago.

However, the
matter is far from settled. There’s plenty of anecdotal evidence
to suggest gun ownership is on the rise – the number of FBI
background checks has skyrocketed, studies indicate that
more women are embracing gun ownership, gun dealers testifying
to how crazy business has been in recent years – but perhaps the
most convincing evidence is the Gallup
Poll, which suggests that there has been no consistent decline
in gun ownership (see chart below for comparison in poll findings).

Gun Ownership:
GSS vs. Gallup

3.
If you own a gun, you’re more likely to have it used against you
than you are to use it in a self-defense situation

There is one
very big, glaring issue with this claim. That is, the number of
Defensive
Gun Uses (DGU) per year is unknown. What’s DGU? It’s the use
of a firearm in self-defense or in defense of others.

Obviously,
this happens all the time. Law-abiding citizens use or brandish
or fire a gun to protect their property or to thwart off a potential
attacker, burglar, rapist, etc. But determining how many times a
year this actually happens is a subject of much debate amongst social
scientists and criminologists because frequently DGUs go unreported
to police, e.g. if one shows a gun to defuse a situation, does that
person always file a police report?

That said,
on the high end, criminologist Gary
Kleck at Florida State University estimates that it’s as high
as 2.5 million DGUs per year. On the lower end of the spectrum,
the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) puts that number
at about 100,000 DGUs per year.

The point is
simply that without knowing this key variable to the equation how
can anyone argue that one is more likely to be shot or injured by
his/her own weapon than they are to use that firearm in a self-defense
situation? What number of annual DGU are pro-gun control advocates
factoring in to make this claim?

Read
the rest of the article

March
16, 2013

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