Control: Exposing the Truth About Guns (12 page)

Common sense tells us that the government is not going to be able to impose background checks on those transfers (and, if fact,
even President Obama’s background check proposal excludes gun transfers within a family). If a husband has purchased a gun from a licensed dealer and has cleared the background checks, the gun will physically be at the home anyway and nothing would prevent his spouse from using it as well. Who technically “owns” the gun is a moot question.

The
Washington Post,
at the prompting of John Lott, asked the researchers who originally wrote the 1997 NIJ study to rerun their numbers, looking only at the origin of gun purchases instead of
all transfers. When they did, things changed quite a bit. The
Post
summarized the new results:

[R]ather 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.

So now, with the margin of error, we are down to as low as 8 percent, and we haven’t even gotten to the biggest problems yet. For example, the vast majority of the purchases disclosed in the original survey (at least 80 percent) were reportedly made
before
the Brady Act instituted mandatory federal background checks on February 28, 1994. Prior to this act, federal law merely required people to sign a statement that they had not been convicted of certain crimes or had a history of significant mental illness. Many people who filled out these forms likely did not consider them to be the equivalent of a “background check.” Given the system put in place after Brady, we should expect a much higher percentage of gun owners to now say that their purchase was subject to a background check than they did back then.

The seventh problem with the survey is that it asked buyers if they
thought
they were buying from a licensed firearms dealer. Back then
there were more than 283,000 federally licensed gun dealers (FLLs),
while today there are just 118,000. Many people who bought from these “kitchen table” FLLs did not realize that they were buying from a fully licensed dealer because the transaction seemed so casual. The perception was that only “brick and mortar” stores were fully licensed.

No one knows exactly how many gun transactions are outside the FFL system today, but—excluding family gifts and
inheritances—it’s hard to believe that it is anywhere near 40 percent. And if someone does decide to study the issue again, I sincerely hope that this time they’ll talk to more than 250 people.

While the 40 percent statistic clearly does not add up, what
really
doesn’t add up is the language used by those who like to cite it. For example:

—
Mayor Michael Bloomberg:
“
The loophole is called the gun show loophole.”

—
Mayor Cory Booker (Newark, New Jersey):
“
We’ve got to end the gun show loophole.”

—
Ed Schultz:
“Closing the gun show loophole would be a big step forward because
that’s 40 percent of the sales in this country.”

The “gun show loophole”? It doesn’t exist. The laws at a gun show are the same as the laws everywhere else: licensed dealers must run background checks; private sellers (those not engaged in the business of selling firearms) do not. Any sale, by anyone, in any place is still subject to federal law requiring that guns cannot be sold to known criminals.

Calling private, noncommercial sales a “gun show loophole” is only meant to rile people up who have never been to a gun show. Controllists hope people hear about a loophole and picture criminals fresh out of prison loading up their trunks with AR-15s.

“The overwhelming majority of my gun crimes and the overwhelming majority of gun crimes committed in America are done by people who get guns illegally, by people who get guns in the secondary market. That’s what I said before. About 40 percent of our guns are being sold in secondary markets, places like gun shows, the Internet,
there’s no regulation, there’s no background checks.”

—MAYOR CORY BOOKER
,
December 17, 2012

It’s just not true. In fact, even if you look at the flawed 1994 survey, only 4 percent of people said they got their firearm at a gun show. And another NIJ study, while admittedly pretty old (it’s from the mid-1980s), found that, as Independence Institute gun policy scholar David Kopel put it, “gun shows were such a minor source of criminal gun acquisition that
they were not even worth reporting as a separate figure.”

Gun shows have never been a significant source of guns for criminals. Under President Clinton the Bureau of Justice Statistics conducted a survey of eighteen thousand state prison inmates in 1997.
Fewer than 1 percent of inmates (0.7 percent) who said they had a gun reported that they’d obtained it from a gun show.

As I said before, when gun control groups refer to “gun shows” what they really are talking about is the private transfer of guns. Eighteen states regulate the private transfer of handguns—some of those regulations go back more than several decades. Not surprisingly, just as with semi-automatic weapon bans, there is
not a single, credible academic study showing that these regulations reduce any type of violent crime.

The survey also exposed another ugly by-product of Clinton-era gun control regulations: those who were big gun dealers back then became registered firearms dealers, but the push to make licensing harder left many private individuals who’d previously sold a gun here or there without one.

“[W]hen Republican pollster Frank Luntz
asked NRA members earlier this year whether they support background checks on every gun sale, 74 percent agreed.”

—ARKADI GERNEY
,
former manager of Mayors Against Illegal Guns, December 16, 2012

“Overwhelmingly, 84 percent of gun owners in America—82 percent of gun owners in America, 74 percent of NRA members believe that should change. Changing that alone,
ending those secondary markets, makes a difference.”

—MAYOR CORY BOOKER
,
December 19, 2012

With all the misinformation out there about background checks, from the shocking claim that “40 percent of all gun purchases are conducted without a background check” to Senator Chuck Schumer’s erroneous claim that background checks have “
blocked 1.7 million prohibited individuals from buying a gun” (these were just initial denials, not people prohibited from ever buying a gun), it isn’t surprising that many polls have found strong support for “universal background checks.” But it’s the claim that “NRA members” overwhelmingly support universal background checks that has proven to be sensational enough to make headlines and be used by controllists. Like all widely quoted statistics that sound counterintuitive, this one is worth taking a closer look at.

The poll in question was done in May 2012 and was commissioned by Mayors Against Illegal Guns—a group overwhelmingly made up of anti-gun Democrats and
founded by gun-hating Mayors Bloomberg of New York City and Thomas Menino of Boston in 2006.

The survey itself was conducted by Frank Luntz, a pollster and Republican consultant who runs those focus groups during elections on Fox News. According to the PBS show
Frontline,
Luntz’s real specialty, however, is “testing language and finding words that will help his clients sell their product or turn public opinion on an issue.”

I’m not big on attacking the messenger when you don’t like the message, but given Luntz’s supposed “specialty” it’s worth noting that his studies have been questioned before. In 1997 he was reprimanded by the American Association for Public Opinion
Research (AAPOR) because he “
repeatedly refused to make public essential facts about his research.”

The association explained: “AAPOR tried on several occasions to get Luntz to provide some basic information about his survey, for example, the wording of the questions he used. For about a year, he ignored these requests.”

To summarize, the guy whose specialty is words refuses to disclose his.

Why am I bringing this up? Because the exact same issue seems to have resurfaced again. According to the
Washington Post,
which reported on the survey, Luntz’s group “
did not provide requested details about the poll’s question wording.”

That’s a pretty big issue, considering the type of question we are talking about here. If you want us to believe that NRA members overwhelmingly support universal background checks, you’d damn well better be willing to tell us how you asked the question. To ask people if they support “background checks on the sale of guns” is not quite the same thing as asking if they support background checks on private transfers within a family or between neighbors or friends.

Aside from the question itself, there are a couple of other red flags. For example, the
Washington Post
reported that the survey “used a non-random opt-in
Internet panel to contact self-identified NRA members.” Self-identified? It gets worse: “The Luntz poll of 945 gun owners nationwide . . . was divided evenly by gun owners who were current or lapsed members of the NRA and non-NRA gun owners.”

Okay, so now it’s “self-identified” current or lapsed NRA members—you can see why people might have questions about the accuracy of the results.

Even if you believe in Luntz and his surveys it’s still clear that Bloomberg’s group has done some cherry-picking. In an
earlier 2009 survey conducted by Luntz for the same group, only 26 percent of non-NRA members and 16 percent of NRA members agreed that they “feel that the
laws covering the sale of guns should be more strict.” And a recent poll of
current
members done for the NRA by AG Research found that just 5 percent support “[a] new
federal law banning the sale of firearms between private citizens.” That’s relevant considering that there would be no way to enforce universal background checks if someone could legally sell a gun to their friend, outside of the system.

The point is that the wording of the question is pertinent to understanding what people really believe about this issue. Since the results of polls that
have
disclosed their wording differ so markedly from the Luntz poll that controllists love to cite, we can only assume that the Luntz poll used some creative wording to get their desired results.

ALAN DERSHOWITZ:

“[John Lott’s research] is junk science at its worst. Paid for and financed by the National Rifle Association . . . .
[The NRA] only funds research that will lead to these conclusions.”

—
July 23, 2012

“[W]hat’s happening is the NRA is buying their data. They’re buying their facts. They’re hiring and
commissioning so-called scholars to come up with the kinds of lies.”

—
December 18, 2012

The only specific name that Professor Dershowitz ever seems to offer as an example of his allegations is John Lott. Dershowitz seems to have a problem with the conclusion reached by Lott’s
study of right-to-carry (RTC) laws in the 1990s, when Lott was a scholar at the University of Chicago Law School—though Dershowitz won’t say exactly what that problem is, other than to call the findings “junk science.”

Others disagree with Dershowitz. For example, the late James Q. Wilson, who was often described as the preeminent criminologist in the United States, dissented from a report on firearms and violence published by the National Academy of Sciences in 2004. Wilson found that, while there might be disagreement over some types of crime, “the evidence presented by Lott and his supporters suggests that
RTC laws do in fact help drive down the murder rate.”

If you want to dismiss Wilson’s dissension and instead rely on the committee report, you find that they are basically asking for more data. They say that the current results are “highly fragile” because some studies reach differing conclusions and some do not include enough years. While that’s not a ringing endorsement, it’s a long way from there to the “junk science” charge leveled by Dershowitz.

But, really, none of this should be very surprising. The idea that more guns could mean less crime is counterintuitive to everything that controllists believe. It doesn’t matter what the data says, or how many times it’s reviewed and verified, because they will
always
find a way to dismiss it.

Attacks on Lott, especially over his alleged “NRA funding,” regularly pop up in the gun control debate and are regularly debunked. (Dershowitz has, of course, never provided any evidence of his claims.) A recap of the debunked charges is included in the sources at the end of this book, but the bottom line is that Lott was a scholar at the University of Chicago Law School, which does not take gun lobby contributions. Each of the three editions of the book he wrote based on his research (
More Guns, Less Crime
)
has been peer-reviewed by multiple academics from across a range of specialties and published by the University of Chicago Press.

The most ironic part of this is that, in contrast to funding by gun control advocates like the Joyce Foundation (where Obama used to serve on the board of directors), there is actually a
lack
of specific funding for gun research coming from any “conservative” groups. If there is bias in what gun research has revealed, Dershowitz would be better served to look at the left-wing wealthy donors who are funding so many of the lies and discredited research that make their way into the mainstream media.

“We need objective scientists looking at all the variables, not looking at kind of pat points being sponsored by the NRA or supporters of the NRA, not pseudo-scientists who come to the problem with the point of view. We need the National Science Foundation, we need other objective scientists looking at everything, looking at the relationship between the amount of guns in society and the amount of crime holding constant racial factors, financial factors, economic, all kinds of other factors. We need to learn the truth about this. We have to follow the facts and follow the truth. And the truth doesn’t come from the NRA, the truth doesn’t come from alleged professors who have a point of view and who have been advocating a particular point of view about this. It comes from objective scientists. We need to know the truth, lives depend on it.”