The Gun Show Loophole in Action

The Portland Press Herald

One of the biggest breaks in the case came when a forensic examination showed that the .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol that Daudoit Butsitsi used to murder Serge Mulongo on Feb. 10, 2010, was the gun that had been used to shoot Richardson a month earlier.

Butsitsi, who is serving a 38-year prison term, has refused to say where he got the gun.

Portland detectives worked with the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to track down the manufacturer, the distributor and the gun shop that sold the gun.

Police hoped that by tracing the trail of ownership, they could get a lead on who Butsitsi got the gun from and who might have shot Richardson.

They found the legal owner of record but then hit a dead end. The owner told police that he sold the gun at a gun show and had no record of who bought it.

What do you think? Is that a good illustration of the problem?

Please leave a comment.

This Week in Responsible Gun Ownership

 From Jesus' General via democommie

The days leading up to and including the first week of 2013, once again, demonstrated America's well-regulated militia's commitment to responsible gun ownership. Here's a partial list of  incidents occurring over the last ten days or so:

• Patriot stands his ground against his own scary-looking arm, shoots it, then applies beer as analgesic to sooth the pain of his bicep's treachery.
• A patriotically liquored-up birthday boy shoots buzzkilling busy-body who attempts to infringe on god-given right to grope random women.

World Firearms Report

Laci sent me the link to this absolutely fascinating report. 

There are two primary markets for illicit arms –
those who need weapons for criminal purposes, and
those who need them for political ones.
 

To get a sense of the relative value of the market for
firearms compared to other forms of contraband, it
helps to look at some concrete examples. On 16
November 2009, the Nicaraguan Government
made what was hailed as “one of the largest seizures
of weaponry ever made by the Nicaraguan authorities”
6 – a consignment of arms for the local representatives
of the Mexican Sinaloa cartel. The
shipment comprised 59 assault rifles, two grenade
launchers and 10 grenades, eight kilos of TNT and
nearly 20,000 rounds of ammunition. While this
sounds impressive, the total value of this shipment
was likely less than US$200,000 at point-of-sale.
Three days later, the Nicaraguan navy seized 2.4
tons of cocaine off the Caribbean coast. The value
of this shipment was at least 400 times as much,
around US$80 million in US wholesale markets.
 
One area where criminal weapons flows could conceivably
provide attractive long-term profits for
organized groups is the movement of weapons from
the USA to Mexico, one of the two trafficking flows
discussed further below. Due to a constitutional
provision that asserts that the right to bear arms
must be protected in a free state, the United States
has the most heavily armed civilian population in
the world, and so opportunities for diversion by
theft are plentiful. But, as will be discussed, it
appears that most of the guns trafficked into Mexico
are actually purchased legally and then transported
clandestinely across the border.

More on Defensive Gun Use

The Propaganda Professor wrote a wonderful and lengthy followup to his other posts on the subject. Here are two small bits.

Gunsters often tout "studies" (i.e., surveys) that supposedly prove that there are hundreds of thousands, or even a few million, defensive guns uses (DGUs) every year. But not even all of these surveys support the "more guns, less crime" motif.   Two of the best known figures, both projected by the Dept. Of Justice, are 108,000 and 65,000 DGUs. Both of which fall far short of the documented 400,000-plus crimes committed with a gun annually. No wonder the gun culture has such a love affair with Dr. Kleck, who posits 2.5 million. He calculated this by interviewing just 222 individuals.

And here is where those surveys actually might be of some value. According to Kleck, 8 percent of the defenders wound or kill their assailants. This figure is certainly too low,  given Kleck's extremely loose standards for what constitutes a DGU. But even so, 8 percent of 2.5 million would mean it happens about 200,000 times per year. And yet only about one in 400 of these is reported in the news? Seriously? The National Crime Victimization Survey says it happens 3 percent of the time out of 108,000 DGUs per year.  That's 3240 in which the offender is wounded if not killed. And yet fewer than one in six is deemed newsworthy? Get real. One might argue that the media would have neither the capacity nor the interest to cover 200,000 such incidents per year. Perhaps not. but they would definitely have both the capacity and the interest to report 3240.

More Proof that DGU Claims are Exaggerated

Like approximately 30,000 other interested people, I read The Truth About Guns every day. I find it to be the single greatest source of information on gun rights and gun control issues, bar none. Recently the readership has topped 1 million unique visitors per month, which breaks down to over 30,000 a day.

Regular commenters must number about 100, maybe more, and one of their favorite topics is DGUs, defensive gun uses.  They have a lot at stake in pushing the exaggerated and inflated estimates of how many DGUs there are each year.  The most popular and most frequently repeated is the famous 2.5 million which Professors Kleck and Gertz came up with some years ago.  If this were true, gun control folks would be hard pressed to compete. Fortunately, many people in many ways have debunked this ridiculous claim, my favorite is The Propaganda Professor's.

Here's another one. If there are 100 million gun owners and 2.5 million DGUs per year, the percentage of gun owners who use their gun defensively each year is 2.5%.  Agreed?

If there are 30,000 unique daily readers of TTAG and 2.5% of them have personal defensive gun uses each year, we should see 750 first-hand reports each year.

I have seen none, not one single first hand report of a defensive gun use by a TTAG reader. Of course it's possible that I missed one or even ten, but there should have been 750, that's more then 2 each day.

Before anyone gets upset about my slanting the numbers, let's do this. Even many gun-rights fanatics admit the 2.5 million figure is too high.  They often say a million or so.  That would bring the 750 down to 300. And let's say there may be readers who are too shy to share their experience on the internet.  I find that hard to believe but let's go wild and say HALF of the folks who have saved lives with their guns and read TTAG every day chose to keep it to themselves.  Now we're down to 150.

I repeat, I have seen none.

The explanation is obvious.  Estimates that put the true figure of DGU down around 1,000 per year make for a percentage that looks like this: 0.00001%.  When you apply that percentage to the 30,000 TTAG readers it's easy to see why we don't regularly see reports of defensive gun use.

What's your opinion?  Please leave a comment.

The Very Best of the Gun Rights Movement

Triple Shooting at West Philadelphia Motorcycle Club

Local news reports

 

We're gonna need a new definition of "mass shooting." Too many of these are happening in non-gun-free zones lately. It make the pro-gun guys, like Bruce Krafft look bad for insisting that ONLY Loughner did his thing in a non-gun-free zone.

Fact #7: There have been 61 mass shootings in the U.S. since 1982. The killer used a legally obtained weapon in 49 of them.
And 60 of those 61 mass murders have occurred in supposedly “gun-free” zones.

Mother Jones put together a nice display from which we can glean several facts. Number one, they do not only happen at gun-free zones, and two, the shooters usually are lawful gun owners, and three, no armed good guys were able to stop them even if they were present.

What's your opinion? Please leave a comment.