Firearms Owners Against Crime
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Institute for Legal, Legislative and Educational Action
Fresh on the heels of Washington CeaseFire's Ralph Fascitelli twice using a discredited statistic about the number of gun transactions that occur without a background check in this country last Friday night, Saturday’s Reno Gazette-Journal - discussing an initiative effort in Nevada to expand background checks - also hammered down on the anti-gun myth.
It came more than a year after the Washington Post fact checker did the same thing, as noted during Friday night's taping of the KOMO Town Hall program dealing with Washington's dueling initiatives, 591 and 594. Twice during that taping, at 16:08 and again near the end at 1:23:05, Fascitelli used that statistic, which is questionable at best.
The Reno newspaper relied on the same source explanation that the WaPo did last year when it called Barack Obama to task for using the 40-percent assertion. The number reportedly came from a 1997 Institute of Justice report that was based on a survey, done at least 20 years ago, using some data from years prior to the time the Brady Law, requiring background checks, took effect. Damaging the 40-percent figure's veracity even more, the random telephone survey involved only 251 people.
Yet the myth persists. Why? Because it sounds dramatic and it leads people to believe there is a giant loophole with background checks that does not exist.
When Fascitelli first referred to the mythical 40 percent, Phil Watson, treasurer for the I-591 campaign that aims to protect the integrity of background checks done in Washington by keeping it in line with a uniform national standard, called him on it. Watson, as reported by this column yesterday, reminded Fascitelli and the audience that the WaPo fact checker gave the figure "three Pinocchios." That's the equivalent of barnyard waste.
The Reno newspaper revealed the source for this lingering 40-percent claim. It's a "fact" sheet distributed by anti-gun billionaire Michael Bloomberg's Mayors Against Illegal Guns (MAIG). Bloomberg has dumped more than $1 million into the I-594 campaign through his Everytown for Gun Safety lobbying organization.
There's more in the Gazette-Journal that ought to be required reading for anyone interested in the background check battles now being waged in Washington and Nevada. It has to do with the claim by gun prohibitionists supporting so-called "universal background checks" that such checks make police and women safer.
This claim also comes from a MAIG report that was not peer reviewed, the newspaper said. The story added that the report "doesn't share the numbers used to reach its conclusions, and it treats correlation as causation, strongly implying that lower rates of violence against women and police was caused by handgun background checks without even attempting to deal with all of the factors that would make the statistics less valid. One could just as easily come to the opposite conclusion by pointing to the surge in gun sales with a corresponding drop in murders of women over the past 20 years nationwide."
And then the Gazette-Journal lowers the proverbial boom. "There has been a peer-reviewed study on this topic worth noting," the newspaper says. "A 2000 study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association examined data to see if the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act made a difference. The law was implemented in 1994 and instituted background checks and waiting periods for handgun sales. The study concluded that it was not associated with 'reductions in homicide rates or overall suicide rates'."
The newspaper found that, "The source links given by Nevadans for Background Checks do not lead to any independent research on gun background checks, but lead solely back to statements by a gun-control advocacy group that are unsupported and ignore conflicting evidence."
Phil Shave, executive director of the Washington Arms Collectors and retired chief of law enforcement for Washington State Parks, was also on Friday night's KOMO panel. At 1:11:44 in the program, he offered this stinging remark: "I think what Ralph is saying is that you need to pass this, Trust us and then you'll find out what's in it." The audience did not have to think twice about that remark, an allusion to former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's remark about the disastrous Obamacare law passed by Congressional Democrats.
Almost at the end of Friday night's taping, Fascitelli had this observation, about the National Instant Check System that I-594 seems to suggest is not adequate: "NICS is a good system, it improves daily. We know that in this state it's stopped tens of thousands of people who shouldn't have gun rights from getting guns…"
This leads to one inescapable question. If the system is working, and it has blocked all of these people from buying guns at retail, why fiddle with it? Why?
http://www.examiner.com/article/forty-percenters-get-drubbing-again-this-time-nevada