Whipped Cream Difficulties

Yesterday, I questioned the LAT‘s assertion (without sources) that 40% of all gun sales are private sales that don’t go through the background check system.

Clayton Cramer also questions this, and links to a blog post by John Fund on “National Review Online”:

The dubious statistic of guns that avoided background checks — which is actually 36 percent — comes from a small 251-person survey on gun sales two decades ago, very early in the Clinton administration. Most of the survey covered sales before the Brady Act instituted mandatory federal background checks in early 1994.

Fund also points out that:

• This figure includes transfers between family members and inherited guns, which Obama’s proposal would not touch.
• “…the federal survey simply asked buyers if they thought they were buying from a licensed firearms dealer. While all Federal Firearm Licensees do background checks, only those perceived as being FFLs were counted. Yet, there is much evidence that survey respondents who went to the smallest FFLs, especially the “kitchen table” types, had no idea that the dealer was actually ‘licensed.’ Many buyers seemed to think that only “brick and mortar” stores were licensed dealers, and so the survey underestimating the number of sales covered by the checks.”

Fund quotes John Lott as believing the actual percentage of firearms transferred in private sales is less than 10%.

In addition, Clayton Cramer his own self has a post over at NRO about the “gun show loophole”:

In 2008, three criminologists (one of them not at all friendly to guns) studied the effects on murder and suicide rates in California (which prohibits private sales without a background check) and Texas (which does not). They looked at homicide and suicide rates for adjacent ZIP codes for a week after gun shows. They found no change in suicide rates, and in Texas, which has no restrictions on private party sales, a small but statistically significant reduction in gun homicides.

There’s also a longer Clayton Cramer post, touching on many of the same points, over at PJ Media.

Is it possible that criminals are too stupid to buy guns at gun shows? Or is it possible that they prefer to obtain guns in less expensive ways, such as by theft?

(Hattip on this to Sebastian. As long as we’re talking about private transfers (and since Sebastian stepped up and gave his own example), I’ll talk about my experience. In my entire gun owning life, I’ve had four transfers that didn’t go through an FFL. Three of those were presents (birthday or Christmas) from family members – my brother, father, and stepfather – which, as noted, would not be affected by Obama’s proposal. Transfer number four was a purchase by me of several guns from a private party who inherited them after the death of a parent. I wrote up two copies of an agreement with the serial number, make and model, and price paid for each gun, kept one and gave the sellers the other. I also gave them a photocopy of my driver’s license. In addition, the sellers were people I had known personally for close to 20 years at the time of the purchase. All of my other purchases have gone through an FFL.)

This entry was posted on Friday, January 18th, 2013 at 5:47 pm and is filed under Clippings, Guns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.