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.
GUN SHOWS ARE WHERE CRIMINALS GET ALL THEIR WEAPONS.
“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.
EVEN A MAJORITY OF NATIONAL RIFLE ASSOCIATION MEMBERS SUPPORT UNIVERSAL BACKGROUND CHECKS.
“[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.
THE NRA IS THE POSTER CHILD FOR BAD RESEARCH.
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 tha
n 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.
THE 2004 REPORT SAID WE NEED MORE DATA AND RESEARCH ON GUNS—AND THEY’RE RIGHT, WE NEED TO KNOW MORE.
“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.”
—ALAN DERSHOWITZ
There’s a big difference between not knowing the truth and not liking it. In this case, Dershowitz falls into the latter category—which is not be surprising, considering that he believes gun control is the “single most effective way to reduce crime” and has said that “the pervasiveness of guns in our society is destroying America.”
He’s clearly not an independent analyst on this, but that doesn’t necessarily make him wrong. The facts are what make him wrong.
Virtually everything that Dershowitz says we need to research has already been researched. Scientists and scholars have looked at all of the relationships he mentions, using extensive law enforcement variables (arrest, execution, imprisonment rates, different types of policing strategies, unionization of police forces, and even hiring and promotion rules for police), income and poverty measures (poverty and unemployment rates, per capita real income, as well as income maintenance, retirement, and unemployment payments), the thirty-six measures of demographic changes (by age, gender, and race), along with the national average changes in crime rates from year to year and average differences across states. In addition, estimates made in prior research account for the differences in various concealed-handgun laws and twelve other types of gun control laws (background checks, gun show regulations, assault weapon bans, penalties for using guns in a commission of a crime, waiting periods, stand-your-ground laws, gun lock laws, and so on).
Is it really possible that Dershowitz hasn’t read any of the research that he is commenting on? Is it really possible that he doesn’t know that the National Research Council, which conducts many studies “mandated and funded by Congress and federal agencies,” produced a comprehensive report on gun violence in 2005? Is it really possible that his statements are true—that no “objective scientists” have ever researched gun violence in a serious way? Or, is it more likely that he just doesn’t like how all of that research turned out?
MORE GUNS MEANS MORE CRIME. ANY DATA TO THE CONTRARY IS A LIE OR NRA PROPAGANDA.
“We don’t need people carrying guns in public places. That’s not what the founding fathers had in mind. It doesn’t add to anybody’s safety. Quite the contrary, it makes us have a much more dangerous society.”
—MAYOR MICHAEL BLOOMBERG, December 16, 2012
“One thing I would suggest is it’s time for us—everybody hates commissions, but it’s time for us to have a commission of 10 great distinguished scientists to put the lie to this notion of more guns, less crime. I know the statistics. I know the FBI data. I teach it. But most Americans believe the NRA propaganda. The NRA buys scholars. They buy statistics. It’s just wrong.”
—ALAN DERSHOWITZ, January 7, 2013
Professor Dershowitz might be an extremely well-known, well-spoken, and brilliant professor, but he is a lawyer, not a statistician. He seems to have very little clue as to what he is talking about when it comes to the gun debate and the effects different laws have had in different places.
Despite his convincing rhetoric, the truth is that Dershowitz has never written a statistical paper. A careful listener should notice that he merely makes grandiose assertions and avoids referencing the precise studies or numbers that would back them up. If he knows the FBI data so well, then why doesn’t he tell us the actual numbers instead of just saying that everything else is wrong?
We’ll get back to that data in a second, but first I have to hand it to Dershowitz for his suggestion that we should create a commission to settle this. I mean, what could go possibly go wrong with that? We just find ten totally independent, well-respected scientists who have absolutely no preconceived notions about guns or political agendas. That should be easy.
This commission idea is a pretty well-known method of quelling debate. Look at what the commission said; case closed! I have no doubt that many control advocates would love nothing more than to get their hands on a final commission report recommending draconian restrictions or outright gun bans. In fact, the only way these people can win this argument is by claiming that the science is settled.
Dershowitz also conveniently seems to forget that, as I mentioned earlier, a National Academy of Sciences commission already has taken a hard look at the data. During the final days of the Clinton administration this panel reviewed 253 journal articles, 99 books, and 43 government publications, along with some of its own empirical work on firearms and violence. Their 2004 report was not able to identify a single gun control regulation (for example, background checks, gun buybacks, assault weapon bans, limits on gun sales, regulating gun dealers) that clearly reduced violent crime, suicide, or accidents.
Considering the work this panel has already done, it’s obvious that Dershowitz doesn’t want a commission; he wants a commission that will reach a different conclusion.
But let’s put all of that aside and instead look at the crux of his argument, which is that all the data is wro
ng and all the studies are biased.
First, since he specifically said he “knows” and “teaches” the FBI data, we’ll start there. The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports detail the number of “Firearms-Related Murder Victims” per capita. If the “notion that more guns, less crime” is the lie that Dershowitz claims it is, then we should very clearly see this firearm murder rate moving higher through the years as more and more firearms make their way out into the public.
But exactly the opposite happens.
Below is a table that lists the best government estimates of the number of firearms in America along with the per capita firearm murder statistics from the FBI.
Firearm Murders Per Capita vs. Total Civilian Firearms in America
Year
Per-Capita Firearm Murder Victims
Total Firearms in the U.S.
Source of Firearm Estimate
1993
6.6
1994
6.3
192 million
Nat’l Inst. of Justice
1995
5.6
1996
5.0
242 million
ATF
1997
4.6
1998
4.1
1999
3.7
2000
3.6
259 million
ATF
2001
3.6
2002
3.8
2003
3.8
2004
3.6