where does the 40% nmber come from?

[justashooter]

http://sea.hxr.us/2011/05/40-of-gun-...e-private.html

Sunday, May 1, 2011
40% Of Gun Sales Are Private
So says Patricia Maisch at the Huffington Post in an article insinuating that the NRA is responsible for gun deaths. Does that sound like bullshit to you? Because it does to me. She writes:

The problem is that forty percent of all gun sales are now made through private sellers.

The link provided for this amazing statistic comes from this story at The Roanoke Times. This story by Joanne Kimberlin states:

A survey for the U.S. Department of Justice estimates that private deals make up around 40 percent of all gun sales.

Notice how the estimate given in the Roanoke Times article shows up as fact at the Huffington Post. The Roanoke Times article gives no source for the statistic, but it is full of other whoppers such as 68% of Virginians wishing law-makers to make the "gun-show loophole" a top priority. Yeah right!

So I asked Google if it could find the source for this stat, and out popped this fact sheet from the Illinois Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. Hmmm... no biased source there, huh? The Roanoke Times article was written in 2008 and the fact sheet was written in 2009, so the fact sheet is not the source for the Times article. But the fact sheet does list its source, Guns in America: National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms by Philip J. Cook and Jens Ludwig of National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs at the U.S. Department of Justice.

This paper, written 1997, has a section on acquisitions for a survey taken in 1994 (so 17 years out-of-date now). On page 6, it states:

The predominant sources of guns, unsurprisingly, were stores (60 per- cent). Other important sources in- cluded family members and acquaintances. The 3 percent of re- spondents who indicated that they ob- tained guns "through the mail" (which is illegal for all but FFLs) may have misremembered or may have referred to a mail-order purchase arranged through an FFL.

100 - 60 is 40, so that's probably where the 40% statistic comes from. The problem with "forty percent of all gun sales are now made through private sellers" is that it leads one to believe no background check is conducted on the transfer (and "now" seems to make the reader believe it is a recent statistic). But as the paper clearly states in the same paragraph, respondents stated their answers as to how the firearms physically made it to them and not the technicalities of the background check.

The paper also has a chart listing the sources:

Gun store: 43%
Pawnshop: 6%
Other store: 11%
Gun show or flea market: 4%
Through the mail: 3%
Member of the family: 17%
Friend or acquaintance: 12%
Other: 4%

The first three figures add up to 60%, hence "the predominant sources of guns, unsurprisingly, were stores (60 percent)". But other sources where background checks probably or must be required are not in the 40%, such as "gun shows" and "through the mail". And note that this is topic is about firearms transfers, not gun sales. Not all transfers are sales.

Additionally, 17% are acquired through family members. If you read Patricia's article, the insinuation is that those 40% of gun sales are done by people attempting to avoid background checks, but a father handing down to his son a family heirloom is a perfectly acceptable private transfer.

So... other than this being an old statistic, and it is from a telephone survey and thus nowhere close to being a fact, and it is about transfers and not sales, and it doesn't include all transfers involving background checks, I guess scaring people with the fact that 40% of all gun sales go under the radar of the FBI is totally accurate.

The Duck over at Maddened Fowl has a post on this with simpler math from 2009 stats:

ATF estimates approx 16.4 million gun sales in 2009, 2 million being used guns, thats about 12% not 40%

That sounds a little more accurate to me, though The Duck is being forgiving. Even used guns sold through FFLs go through a background check, so the number is probably lower than 12%.

[PreserveandProtect]

How do you quantify something you don't know about? If you say the buyers didn't file any paperwork, then the estimate comes from...what, satellite surveillance of every outdoor and x-ray vision of in-building location in the country?

Here is the answer.

1. Make up what suits you.
2. Double it.
3. Call a few radicals on your donors list. Interpret their rant to support your desired outcome
4. Write it up as results from a half-baked 'survey'
5. Change the word 'survey' to 'study' because it sounds more official
6. Write articles quoting 'facts' the BS study
7. Make a short, official sounding, sound bite and circulate into the like-minded media mega machine for dissemination
8. Repeat ad nauseum

Repeated enough times it becomes accepted 'fact' to the sheeple who make no effort to question anything they read.

[tsafa]

They make numbers up. If it is a private sale, then there is no record, hence no statistics to report.

[jtwalker]

To quote Homer Simpson:

"Aw, people can come up with statistics to prove anything, Kent. Forty percent of all people know that.”

[GeneCC]

Sure hope that she cited her Stats.

I still remember the "ninety percent of all firearms in Mexico that are used in crimes come from the United States". This may be indirectly true - the US did ship a lot of M-16s and military issue AK-47s to El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Costa Rica. None of these military arms came from your gun store, all came from the DOD or "friends" in our Intelligence community.

Gotta parse the words with these people.... some of them ARE Attorneys and may be hoping that the average person does not read the fine print. Especially right now when the blood is barely dry on the floors of Sandy Creek Elementary School.


Takes a very special breed of Cynic to take advantage of someone's natural love and fear for their own children. One shudders to think what these people will do to us once we are mostly disarmed. Probably not death camps, more likely we'll be living lives entangled in red tape "administered" by empowered children who can read a Rule Book. Doing what we are told if we know what's good for us. If we even make a face we'll see ourselves shuffled off to "counseling" or "attitude adjustment".

There are things worse than Death Camps. There is the dystopia of being regimented by Idealists who can't even manage their own affairs but feel perfectly capable of managing anyone else's lives. A gigantic "Simon Sez" run by incompetents for incompetents.

[ForeverPA]

A few threads down

http://forum.pafoa.org/pennsylvania-...ck-really.html

Regardless of what the law allows, I would never sell or give a gun to anybody, including my own children, without proper accounting. I would treat the buyer like a stranger and do it at an FFL. This is a genuine loophole.

[PreserveandProtect]

Regardless of what the law allows, I would never sell or give a gun to anybody, including my own children, without proper accounting. I would treat the buyer like a stranger and do it at an FFL. This is a genuine loophole.

@ My bolded emphasis

Why not? If *you* don't trust your own children with a gun to the point you feel the need to 'put it in writing' why in the heck should any of us in society trust them with a LTCF?

[facepalm]

[ForeverPA]

@ My bolded emphasis

Why not? If *you* don't trust your own children with a gun to the point you feel the need to 'put it in writing' why in the heck should any of us in society trust them with a LTCF?

[facepalm]

If you think you know everything about your grown kids, you don't have kids. It is not a matter of trust.