Stupidity
Josh Horwitz is having trouble with reality and says that all those gun sales statistics are wrong.
There is only one explanation for these facts: It is the law-abiding citizens with guns, not the criminals, who are committing the majority of the gun homicides.
That’s beautiful logic.
February 6th, 2012 at 11:38 am
More lies from the gun control crowd.
February 6th, 2012 at 12:22 pm
I’ll go out on a limb here and say that Horowitz does have a valid basis for his criticism of numbers on gun sales. He is technically correct (the best kind of correct! #hermes_conrad) that NICS checks do not strictly represent the sale of new firearms. As a CCDW holder in KY, the state may run an NICS check on me automatically each month to make sure I’ve behaved myself. NICS checks also happen for any transfer of a firearm across state lines or any sale of a firearm from an FFL. So it could be secondhand sales or gifts or whatever.
Even accounting for that, the sheer number of NICS checks does indicate some combination of the conditions that lead to an NICS check. Those are more CCDW holders and transfers of guns. While this may not be a clear picture of new sales, it is a clear picture of a lot of activity with guns. The market is moving and shaking and thats a good thing.
Horowitz’s assertions about import/export numbers is wrong. If the gun industry was importing or manufacturing too many firearms (ie, the opposite of Kel-Tec) to the tune of even a few hundred thousand, there would be a shift in the market. Either production would fall, or prices would fall. While it is correct that guns are very shelf-stable and that gun owners/dealers are peculiar bunch with a tendency for hoarding, we are not immune from market forces.
Finally while there are some valid points here about the data, we should not be too eager to release those numbers. An early step of confiscation is getting an accurate count of how many guns you’re expecting to have to round up.
February 6th, 2012 at 2:07 pm
Aside from his misrepresenting the diversion from manufacturer issue, there’s a seeming hole in Horwitz’s “guns going direct to criminal” logic that I don’t have the means to do the math on.
If the average “time to crime” on recovered guns is staying steady at just north of a decade, and we have only required serial numbers on firearms, which allow tracing from manufacturer to wholesaler to dealer to first purchaser, since ’58, and orders of magnitude more firearms have been produced and purchased in the last decade; either there are a whole lot of really old guns skewing the numbers (about all of them ever produced) or most guns used in crime are actually about a decade old and have indeed passed through several hands prior to their recovery. Not guns purchased for immediate (<2 years or so) use in crime directly by "law-abiding til then" criminal or their associated straw buyer.
Which is what the data actually suggests.
February 6th, 2012 at 7:22 pm
Another fault with the article is the definitions of what constitutes homicide. In Scotland, one act which results in seven deaths is counted as one homicide. In Ireland and the UK, each victim of a mass murder counts as one.
The Dunblane shootings, since they happened in Scotland, statistically counted as one homicide, whereas in England it would have resulted in the recording of 17 homicides, and Lockerbie in 1988 similarly as one, rather than 270.
Also, if there are no charges brought as a result of a homicide, or a person is not convicted, the event is reclassified as not a homicide. A good example is 1997. In that year, the police of England and Wales initially reported 738 homicides. Due to this methodology, only 650 of those deaths remain classified as homicide.
The differences in collecting data makes it useless for statistical comparison.