Whipped Cream Difficulties

Philadelphia magazine recently ran a story called “The War Within” about John P. Boudreau, a former Marine sniper “who says he’s haunted by his actions in the Middle East”.

Here’s the headline and subhead according to Google:

The War Within: Meet the Sniper Who Killed 2,200 People in Iraq

“killed 2,220 people in Iraq”? Alarm bells ringing yet? Carlos Hathcock, for comparison purposes, had 93 confirmed kills. Chuck Mawhinney is credited with 103: that makes him #1 on the Marine list. Vasily Zaytsev had 242 confirmed kills, and Simo Häyhä 505 with a rifle.

So this guy had about 22 times as many kills as Hathcock and Mawhinney, about nine times as many as Zaytsev, and four times as many as Simo Häyhä, the most bad-ass sniper ever? And nobody raised any questions: like, how did you get to 2,200 kills? After, say, kill #110, or #200, or somewhere long before #2,200, you’d think the Marines would be pulling this guy back to teach at the sniper school in Quantico (or Pendleton, or Lejeune).

So why didn’t they? And why haven’t I linked to the article yet, or even a Google cached version of it, so you can play “spot the problems” along with me?

Yep. It was all a fraud. The magazine, and the writer (a Philadelphia radio host) got suckered by Boudreau:

In a series of conversations on Wednesday and Thursday, Boudreau, who claims a residence in Chester County, acknowledged that much of what he had told Gargano over the preceding several months—information he had also confirmed to Philadelphia magazine’s fact-checker—was either embellished or flat-out fabricated.

The magazine hasn’t even been able to confirm that Boudreau was a Marine. The article has been pulled from their website. (Google returns a search result for the original article, but the article has also been pulled from Google’s cache. Bing seems to have it cached, but I can only read page 1 and the comments.)

I don’t thnk the magazine was acting in bad faith, but it does bring to mind an observation that’s not original to me. I wouldn’t suggest we abandon the all-volunteer military, but back when we had a draft, you could count on the fact that a large percentage of the population – including the guys in the newsroom – had served in the military and could spot military related bullshit when they head it. If we still had a draft, I can imagine a Philadelphia magazine editor telling the writer, “I was in the Marines as a scout sniper myself. I talked to this guy: he doesn’t even know what color the boathouse at Pendleton is.”

Layers of fact checking, indeed.

(Forgot the hattip to Lord Jim.)

Yesterday’s NYT ran an article about conflicted gun owners, “For Some, Owning Guns Doesn’t Necessarily Mean Liking Them“.

The article leads off with Michael Kundu:

Mr. Kundu is a master marksman from rural Washington who owns pistols and assault rifles for self-defense, all while claiming to detest the presence of guns in his life and in the broader American culture.

More:

In Mr. Kundu’s case, the conflict is that he enjoys competitive shooting even as he perceives danger in what he describes as a local arms race that he feels powerless to escape.

I would have gone after this story yesterday, but I didn’t for two reasons. I was out and about much of the day, and Sebastian already did.

You see, there’s no evidence that Kundu is a competitive shooter:

Kundu claims to be a master marksman in Washington State. The governing body for that kind of shooting is the NRA or WSRPA. Most competitive shooters will have match results online somewhere, especially at that level. So I decided I would start digging. If he is truly ranked Master in high-power, someone should have heard of him, or shot with him, and there should be a record. When you do that kind of competition, and are ranked highly, you’ve shot with an awful lot of people in an awful lot of matches. I couldn’t find any match results indicating this guy is a serious competitor, but what I did find destroys the whole NYT narrative.

Yeah, it gets better. Kundu is also involved with the Sea Shepherd people. You know, the anti-whaling activists? The ones that the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals calls “pirates”?

There’s more over at Shall Not Be Questioned, including what it really takes to get a handgun in California. (Hint: it isn’t easier than getting a iPhone, unless you’re a lying liar who lies, like John Flores and Patricia Speed.) I encourage you to go read the whole thing. My hope is that Sebastian has made the NYT public editor aware of Susan Saulny’s dishonesty; not that I think it will matter much, but I haven’t had all hope beaten out of me yet.

Previously on WCD, we talked a little about the “40% of all gun sales are done without background checks” figure.

Ted Cruz has pointed out some of the same holes we discussed in those figures, and “Politifact Texas” decided they’d fact check him.

What did they find?

The 40 percent figure originated in a 1997 National Institute of Justice study by researchers Philip Cook of Duke University and Jens Ludwig of the University of Chicago, who examined data from a 1994 telephone survey about gun ownership taken months after the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act of 1993 took effect, mandating background checks of individuals buying guns at gun shops.

The law doesn’t apply to private sellers at gun shows, flea markets or people who post firearms for sale on the Internet.

What Politifact means by “people who post firearms for sale on the Internet” is unclear. If they mean people who sell to other people locally, that’s quasi-true. If a firearm – any firearm, rifle, pistol, or shotgun – is being shipped rather than sold face to face, the gun has to be shipped from a licensed dealer to a licensed dealer, and the receiving dealer has to do a background check before turning over the firearm.

Of the 2,568 households surveyed, only 251 people answered the question about the origin of their gun.
In those answers, Cook and Ludwig found that 35.7 percent of respondents reported obtaining their gun from somewhere other than a licensed dealer. (That has been rounded up to 40 percent.)

Rounding does not work that way!

When the Washington Post’s fact-checking project, the Fact Checker, asked Ludwig to revisit the data, the newspaper said, results suggested that purchases without background checks amounted to 14 to 22 percent, not 40 percent.

By the way, Politifact also quotes the Post as pointing out the small sample size means there’s a large margin of error: “plus or minus six percentage points”. So it could be anywhere from 8% to 28%. And by the way…

“…the survey was taken in late 1994, eight months after the Brady law went into effect, and the questions were asked about gun purchases in the previous two years. So some of the answers concerned gun purchases that took place in a pre-Brady environment.”

And more:

For his part, Cook, the other study author, told us he has no idea whether the 40 percent figure remains reliable. “This survey was done almost 20 years ago. … It’s clear there are a lot of transactions that are not through dealers,” Cook said. “How many, we’re not really clear on it. … We would say it’s a very old number.”
Other scholars had similar views.
“I don’t see how anyone could know that number,” said James Jacobs, Center for Research in Crime and Justice at New York University School of Law.

More:

The surveys took place after the law took effect, Cook said, but it’s correct that the vast majority of gun acquisitions identified by respondents took place before then, given that respondents were asked to focus on guns acquired within two years, meaning 1992 and 1993.

And there were 18 states that required background checks prior to Brady. But:

Even so, Cook told us, he and Ludwig did not use information on individual states in doing their analysis. He emailed that “the survey provides an accurate representation of the nation as a whole but not of individual states.” Also, he stressed, the survey had no questions about whether there had been a background check and respondents also weren’t asked the states where they had acquired their guns. He agreed there is “no way to reach any conclusions about background checks for any of the transactions that are reported in the survey.”

So, summing up: the figure was never 40%, but 36% (see, that’s how rounding works), and is probably closer to 20% before the margin of error kicks in, which could make the actual figure anywhere from 8% to 22%. And the survey was conducted in a pre-Brady environment. And the researchers themselves say (again I quote) there is “no way to reach any conclusions about background checks for any of the transactions that are reported in the survey”.

PolitiFact’s rating: “Half True”. I see nothing in their summary that refutes anything Ted Cruz said, or that justifies the “half true” rating.