{"id":57245,"date":"2020-07-24T11:36:04","date_gmt":"2020-07-24T16:36:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=57245"},"modified":"2020-07-24T11:36:04","modified_gmt":"2020-07-24T16:36:04","slug":"57245","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/?p=57245","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

The Media Can\u2019t Stop Misleading on Guns<\/a><\/p>\n

At this point, there is simply no excuse for it.<\/span><\/p>\n

W<\/span>ith<\/span>\u00a0the possible exception of religion, there is no issue in American political life that is as poorly covered as guns. At\u00a0RealClearPolitics<\/em>, John Lott\u00a0reports<\/a>\u00a0that legacy media outlets often quite literally allow anti\u2013Second Amendment activists to write their news stories on gun policy.\u00a0Politico<\/em>\u00a0hasn\u2019t quite done that today, but .\u00a0.\u00a0. well, I\u2019m not sure having reporters dutifully repackaging Everytown USA press releases is any better.<\/p>\n

Politico<\/em>\u2019s\u00a0piece<\/a>\u00a0is headlined \u201cBlocked gun sales skyrocket amid coronavirus pandemic.\u201d I have been curious to find out how the anti\u2013Second Amendment crowd would spin the recent spike in gun sales \u2014 which has been\u00a0especially<\/a>\u00a0concentrated among new owners and women \u2014 and I now have my answer:<\/p>\n

Internal FBI data reveal a jarring new stat: The number of people trying to buy guns who can\u2019t legally own them has skyrocketed. That came as part of a surge in gun purchases in the first three months of 2020, compared to the same time period in 2019. And the change has raised concerns about gun safety.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Reporters who lard up their pieces with adjectives such as \u201cjarring,\u201d \u201cmassive,\u201d \u201cwhopping,\u201d and \u201craised concerns\u201d are usually trying to convince readers of something that isn\u2019t true. And so it is here. Indeed, all this\u00a0Politico<\/em>\u00a0piece tells us is that the National Instant Criminal Background Check System is working exactly as intended.<\/p>\n

Groups such as Everytown spend a lot of time trying to convince Americans that their country doesn\u2019t have a background-check system at all. They\u2019re good at it, too; millions of voters seem to be under the impression that criminals can walk into a Walmart and walk out with an AR-15. And yet suddenly Everytown is upset that \u201cjarring\u201d numbers of people are being denied guns by the FBI. Isn\u2019t that the point of the system?<\/p>\n

And about those numbers .\u00a0.\u00a0. the piece goes on:<\/p>\n

In March 2019, the FBI\u2019s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) ran background checks on 823,273 attempted gun buys (the system immediately greenlights the vast majority of transactions). This past March, however, NICS processed more than 1.4 million background checks \u2014 a massive spike. The most dramatic shift, though, might be in how many people the system blocked from buying guns.<\/p>\n

In March 2019 and February 2020, the NICS system blocked about 9,500 and 9,700, respectively. But in March 2020, it blocked more than double that amount: a whopping 23,692 gun sales.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What these stats show is that very few prohibited Americans attempt to buy guns from dealers (this number is even lower than typically suggested, because many of them aren\u2019t attempting to hoodwink the FBI but are simply ignorant of the law), and that this is as true in 2020 as it was in 2019. The rejection\u00a0rate<\/a>\u00a0in February 2019 was 0.6 percent and in February 2020 it was 0.68 percent. In March 2019, the rejection rate was 1.15 percent, and it was 1.64 percent in March 2020. As a 2019 Government Accountability Office report inidicates, the number of rejected applications has\u00a0consistently<\/a>\u00a0been around 1 percent for years. Remaining around the historical average is neither \u201cwhopping,\u201d \u201cjarring,\u201d nor \u201cmassive,\u201d despite the framing of the piece.<\/p>\n

The piece goes on:<\/p>\n

NICS\u2019s\u00a0website<\/a>\u00a0says it only blocks gun sales for a narrow number of reasons: because the would-be purchaser has been involuntarily committed to a mental institution, for instance, or because the potential buyer is subject to a restraining order for stalking an intimate partner.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Actually, NICS says nothing of the sort on its website. Rather, it offers eleven rather broad grounds and circumstances in which a person can be denied a gun. We know they are broad because no other constitutional right has anything close to as many restrictions on it. I can assure you that if the FBI had eleven reasons to deny women abortions,\u00a0Politico<\/em>\u00a0wouldn\u2019t be characterizing them as \u201cnarrow\u201d constraints.<\/p>\n

Politico<\/em>\u00a0finishes off the short piece off by quoting a couple of completely baseless statements from Everytown president John Feinblatt:<\/p>\n

\u201cThis FBI data confirms our fear that America\u2019s background check system is completely overwhelmed, which means that more guns are slipping through the cracks and being sold to prohibited purchasers,\u201d John Feinblatt, the president of Everytown, said in a statement. \u201cMitch McConnell can stop this by taking action to close the Charleston loophole, but he\u2019s too scared of the gun lobby\u2019s waning political power to do anything, even as gun violence rises in the midst of a pandemic.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There is no evidence to bolster the assertion that the system is \u201ccompletely overwhelmed\u201d or that more people are \u201cslipping through the cracks.\u201d In fact, the FBI spokesperson says in the piece that the NICS \u201chas reallocated resources to address the incoming volume of NICS transactions.\u201d<\/p>\n

35<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n

Also, there\u2019s no such thing as the \u201cCharleston loophole.\u201d I realize that activists such as Feinblatt think every gun purchase in America reflects a \u201cloophole\u201d that needs to be closed, but the three-day waiting limit on checks was purposely written into the 1998 law \u2014 which makes it\u00a0the opposite<\/em>\u00a0of a loophole. The provision was added to the law to ensure that the FBI couldn\u2019t arbitrarily deny Americans their Second Amendment rights. The Charleston church shooter obtained his gun \u2014 despite his drug use \u2014 not because of problems with the law but because of\u00a0a data-entry error<\/a>. If that is distressing to Feinblatt and his organization, perhaps he should ask the Democratic House to stop ignoring FBI requests for more NICS funding.<\/p>\n

The simple truth is that these numbers reflect an established pattern: When gun purchases rise \u2014 probably initially owing to the helplessness felt by many people during the COVID-19 lockdown, and later compounded by the lawlessness that erupted in big cities \u2014 other numbers will rise with them. Ultimately, Feinblatt\u2019s objection isn\u2019t to more background checks; it\u2019s to more gun ownership. That\u2019s his job, so it\u2019s to be expected. But what\u2019s the media\u2019s excuse?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Media Can\u2019t Stop Misleading on Guns At this point, there is simply no excuse for it. With\u00a0the possible exception of religion, there is no issue in American political life that is as poorly covered as guns. At\u00a0RealClearPolitics, John Lott\u00a0reports\u00a0that legacy media outlets often quite literally allow anti\u2013Second Amendment activists to write their news stories … Continue reading “”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[64],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-57245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-deceit"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=57245"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57245\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57246,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57245\/revisions\/57246"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=57245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=57245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/milesfortis.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=57245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}