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Who’s Buying All Those Guns?

March 4, 2022

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              Now that the great gun splurge provoked by Covid-19 appears to have come to an end, or it at least slowing down, what did it all mean? Why did people buy all those guns, and who were the people buying all those guns?

              Here are rounded-off baseline numbers for FBI-NICS background checks:

              2019 – 12,110,000

              2020 – 20,270,000

              2021 – 17,450,000

              Two months ago – January – the FBI processed sightly less than 1,120,000 checks.  In January 2021 they processed 1,961,000 checks. Last month the total number was 1,261,000 compared to 1,314,000 in February 2021.

              In fact, what drove the explosion of gun purchases in 2020 wasn’t the Pandemic as much as it was the murder of George Floyd and subsequent street unrest.  Floyd (of blessed memory) was killed on May 25,2020.  The FBI-NICS call center processed 2,125,886 background checks in June. Nobody had ever seen 2 million checks in one single month, although that number would be surpassed by monthly totals in early 2021.

              When did that idiot attorney in Missouri come out on his front steps and wave an AR-15 at a group of BLM marchers going past his home?  Try June 29, 2020. McCloskey, the guy with the gun, is now running for the U.S. Senate.  Imagine living in Missouri and having Mark McCloskey and Josh Hawley representing you in the Senate. Perfect, just perfect.

              In the meantime, let’s get back to all those gun buyers, particularly the new buyers.

              My good friends at Harvard and Northeastern have published a new study which attempts to figure out who was buying all those guns over the last several years.  You can read a summary of their excellent article here or you can download the entire article here.

                The survey gathered data on gun ownership and purchases from 19,000 adults, of whom one-third said they owned guns. Of the gun-owning group, one-third said they had purchased at least one gun since 2019, and of that group, 23% said that the gun they purchased in 2019 or 2020 was their very first gun.

              In other words, most of the guns purchased in 2020, when total sales were 60% higher than in 2019, were bought by people who were already gun owners which meant they were older, White men. The bottom line: “The number of new gun owners created 1 January 2019 to 26 April 2021, was sufficiently large (an estimated 7.5 million) and diverse (approximately half were female and almost half were people of color) to have a modest effect on the prevalence of firearm ownership and on the demographic profile of current gun owners. Note the word ‘modest.’

              When the researchers conducted a previous study of gun owners in 2015-2016, they found that the number of new owners in those years was only one-quarter as many as the number of people who bought their first gun in 2020-2021. In other words, the survey appears to show that the post-Pandemic gun-owning population is somewhat more diverse – gender-wise and racially – than what was typical of Gun-nut Nation before the Pandemic and the unrest precipitated by the murder of George Floyd.

              Our friends at The Trace have just published a long article which takes an in-depth look at this new gun-owning demographic and finds that “Black women are arming themselves – and pushing against stereotypes of who owns firearms.” The article is based on interviews with African-American women who attended a gun class held by the Phoenix chapter of the National African American Gun Association which claims to have 40,000 members nationwide.

              Don’t get me wrong. I’m in favor of diversity no matter where it occurs and where it is found. The only problem with promoting the idea of a more diverse gun-owning community is a problem which isn’t mentioned either by the Harvard-Northeastern research team or the reporter at The Trace. And the problem has to do with using and understanding the word ‘ownership’ when it comes to guns.

              Guns are the only consumer item which cannot be purchased or owned except by an adult who can pass an FBI-NICS background check. So, the fact that someone walks into a gun shop, buys a gun, and has his or her background validated by the FBI, doesn’t mean that the buyer is actually the person who is going to use that gun.

              This may come as a great shock to my friends in Gun-control Nation, but many of the individuals who walk into a gun shop and commit a felony by trying to buy a gun for someone else, don’t even know that what they are doing happens to be illegal as hell. I would love to see just one survey in which non-gun owners are asked to define a ‘straw’ sale.

              “Oh, he just forgot his glasses so he can’t fill out the form.” That’s the usual comment when someone reads Question 21a on Form 4473 which asks whether they are going to be the actual owner of the gun. And they aren’t lying, by the way. They just don’t know.

              My friends who do research or write media articles about guns often make the mistake of putting their brains in someone else’s head. With all due respect to how the Pandemic has fostered a new gun culture in the United States, I’m still waiting to see if it’s true.

Why Do Americans Keep Buying Guns?

February 24, 2022

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              I bought my first gun when I was 12 years old. It was a Smith & Wesson K-frame revolver which I got at a tag sale off of Highway 441 in Florida for fifty bucks. This was in 1956 and since then I have probably bought and traded for at least another 300 guns. Right now, I own around 60 guns, maybe a few more, maybe a few less.

              I like guns. I’ve always liked guns. And if you were to ask me why I like guns, my answer would be that I just like guns. I have liked guns ever since I sat in the movie theater near my home and watched Alan Ladd outdraw Jack Palance in the movie ‘Shane.’ Sometimes as I walked to school I would even stop and pretend that I was yanking out my revolver and winning a quick-draw contest against a bad guy right then and there.

              I never actually needed any of those guns, then or now. I need a car, or I can’t get to work. I need clothes or I can’t leave my house. I need food or at some point I won’t feel very good. And I need my pills or my blood pressure and my A1C will get out of control – let’s hear it for Big Pharma!

              The point is that I really need to buy certain consumer products every day. But the category of consumer products that I require in order to lead a normal life doesn’t include guns. And I’m not at all unusual in that respect.

              The truth is that if we have 300 million or more personally-owned guns sitting in the basements, attics, garages, glove compartments and coat pockets of law-abiding American adults, not a single one of these weapons is needed for any tangible purpose at all.

              Gun-nut Nation loves to talk about how guns represent a unique American tradition – the 2nd Amendment and all that. Know what American tradition guns really represent? The American tradition and practice of consumer product marketing, which we do better than anyone else.

              Want to know what made our Industrial Revolution a real revolution? It was the fact that over the second half of the nineteenth century, we began manufacturing cheap, mass-produced consumer products that went into every American home. When was the first Sears catalog published? 1888.  When was the first advertising agency founded?  It was a company in Philadelphia named N. W. Ayer which started operating around the same time.

              And don’t make the mistake of thinking that the marketing of guns for ‘self-defense’ is an advertising strategy that’s just become commonplace over the last several decades.  The picture above is an ad for Iver Johnson handguns, a company that started operating in Fitchburg, MA in 1871. Where the factory was located in Fitchburg is now a Dairy Queen.

              I don’t know whether the gun industry was listening to consumers when they started promoting the idea of self-defense guns or whether it was the other way around. What I do know is that for all the talk about how the recent gun-buying splurge is a reaction to the insecurities engendered by the Pandemic or the fears of unrest following the mass demonstrations after the killing of George Floyd, the fact is that even though there appears to be an increase in the number of first-time gun consumers, most of the guns purchased over the last several years ended up in the hands of consumers who already owned guns.

              The NSSF says that 5 million consumers bought guns for the first time in 2020, which if this calculation is correct, means the total number of gun-owning consumers in the United States increased by roughly ten percent. Now there’s no consumer product industry that wouldn’t like to see a ten percent increase in the size of its market, but let’s not assume that every law-abiding American is rushing out to buy a first-time gun.

              Using FBI-NICS checks as the proxy for determining gun sales, the total sales volume for 2020 appears to have been 65% higher than 2019. In other words, the same consumers who like to spend their money on guns keep spending their money on guns.

              Why does a certain group of consumers keep buying the same product again and again? Since I’m one of those consumers, my reason is what I stated above – I happen to like guns.

Did Gun Violence Increase Because So Many People Bought Guns?

January 23, 2022

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              One of the most unfortunate consequences of the Covid-19 Pandemic was a significant upsurge in violent crime. At least this is what has been claimed by the National Commission on Covid-19 and Criminal Justice (NCCCJ)  headed by Thomas Abt, and covered in a report that you can read right here. In 2020, according to this report, homicides were up 36% in 28 major cities, an increase led by a spectacular rise in shootings and gun homicides, with gun murders up 55% in Chicago and 39% in New York.

              Has this narrative made its way into the GVP community? Of course it has. And the reason that the crime increase is now a topic of daily GVP discussion is because it happens to have occurred at the same time there was an unprecedented increase in the sale of guns. So, for example, more than 2 million guns were sold in March 2020, whereas roughly half that many were sold in March of the previous year.

              This kind of year-to-year increase in gun sales has declined slightly in 2021, but not by all that much. Handgun and long gun sales in March 2021 were still 1,700,000, and that’s not chopped liver even in my book.

              So, if you want to believe that all those guns being bought out there is somehow responsible for the increase in crime since the start of the Pandemic, particularly violent crime, i.e., murders and aggravated assaults, you go right ahead. After all, you now have all this ‘evidence-based’ data from the research done by a group of experts at the NCCCJ.

              And if you want some more ‘proof’ on the connection between increased gun sales and increased violent crime, you can always consult the Gun Violence Archive (GVA) which basically is saying the same thing.

              That being said, how do you explain a government report from the DOJ’s Bureau of Justice Statistics, which says that violent crimes actually dropped from 2 million in 2020 to 1.6 million in 2020, and that over the same two-year period, the number of people who were victims of gun crimes declined by nearly 30 percent?

              You don’t. You ignore it.

              Except thanks to our friend, the hated and reviled John Lott, you can download and read the report right here.

              Of course, if John Lott put this report out there, it must be a fake, right? After all, we know that anything John Lott says is just a big, fat lie, right?

              I have been booted off of more than one GVP Facebook page and thrown out of multiple GVP online groups for saying positive things about John Lott’s research, but I don’t care. My self-appointed task, as I see it, is to try and figure out what’s true about gun violence, and not what a bunch of people who might otherwise send me a donation may want to hear.

              Don’t get me wrong. I’m no Galileo sitting in a tower at Arcetri outside of Florence thanks to the Inquisition putting me under house arrest. I can leave my house any time I want and drive down to the corner to pick up the Chinese food or maybe get a ‘regular’ and a corn muffin at the local Dunks.

              So, here’s what I know about the increase in violent crime during the Pandemic and the surge in gun sales during the same period of time. Coincidence? Absolutely. Cause and effect? WTFK?

              In 2019, the ATF traced 354,264 guns, of which 3.3% were picked up in instances of aggravated assault. In 2020, the ATF traced 393,212 guns, of which 4.1% were guns picked up by cops investigating aggravated assaults.

              That’s some big increase. Yea, right. Some big increase.

              Want to know why ATF conducts 25% of all gun traces every year? It’s called ‘illegal possession of a gun.’ In 2019, this category accounted for 87,986 traced guns. In 2020, the number was 89,905, an increase of 2.2 percent.

              Another big increase in crime guns floating around during the Pandemic year.

              I happen to disagree with Lott about his claims that more guns owned and carried by civilians is a way to reduce crime. You can download and read my critique right here.

              Engaging in an academic exchange of views is one thing, relying on a report whose data is at variance with the facts in order to create an advocacy argument is something else.

              My good friends in the GVP need to be a bit more careful with what they want to think and believe.

The Media Gets It Wrong On Guns Again.

December 2, 2021

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              Here we go again. We have the horrendous shooting in a high school which claimed four lives and every internet journalist becomes an instant expert on guns. Want to make a quick few hundred bucks? Just send a story idea about guns around to various digital media sites and some editor desperate to fill up the daily content quota will tell you to bring it on.

              So, today we get a story on Business Insider by someone named Katie Balevic which has the following headline: “The pistol the Oxford High School shooting suspect used was one of nearly 700,000 firearms that Americans bought or tried to buy during Black Friday sales.”

              The author of this article, identified as a News Fellow on the Weekend News team, then goes on to say that “Black Friday was one of the most productive days in gun sales to date. On Black Friday alone, 187,585 background checks were made, a slight increase from 186,645 in 2020.”

              There’s only one little problem with Ms. Balevic’s story. It’s completely wrong. There is absolutely no connection between the number of background checks performed by the FBI-NICS phone gang on a daily, weekly, monthly, or yearly basis and the number of guns that actually move into the hands of people allegedly buying all those guns.

              What Katie Balevic used to give us those frightening numbers about gun sales is data published by the FBI which aggregates the total n umber of telephone calls received each day regardless of the reason for the call. If the intrepid reporter knew the first thing about what she was writing about, she would have consulted the publication from FBI-NICS which lists calls received from each state, as well as the reason for the call.

              Guess what? If Ms. Balevic had looked at this latter document, she would have quickly realized that mor than half the calls received by FBI-NICS have nothing to do with the purchase of guns at all. Oops. Sorry about that.

              Incidentally, I’m going to send a copy of this column to the News Fellow of the Weekend News team and wait for a reply. Want to take the short odds that I’ll receive a reply? Yea, right. I’ll receive what Grandpa would call “gurnisht” (read: nothing.)

              The problem with spreading mis-information about guns is that it impacts the discussion about gun violence in ways that can only make it more difficult to figure effective responses to the 100,000+ fatal and non-fatal intentional gun injuries which occur every year.

              What really bothered me about the mis-reading of the NICS data is that it just so happens that what drives increases in the phone calls to NICS has been increases in the background checks not performed on gun sales, but on gun licensing, both for new licenses and renewals.

              The whole licensing issue has been fraught with controversy because it’s not clear to what extent requiring a licensing procedure before someone can buy a gun has been an effective way to help reduce gun violence events. And the fact that we can now compare licensing activity to gun violence rates in every state should be a process which could be used to determine whether our regulatory system is working as well as it should or not.

              I have yet to see one, single media person focus on the NICS data covering license checks. Instead, what we get every few months are versions of what we have just gotten from Ms. Balevic, which is the usual hand-wringing about the enormous number of guns being sold, albeit by using data which is simply wrong.

              Either we are going to be informed properly about guns and un violence or we are not going to be informed in any kind of appropriate way. And if we are informed inappropriately, how in God’s name can we ever figure out what changes need to be made in gun laws to reduce the 300 fatal and non-fatal shootings which occur every day?

What’s More Important During A Pandemic?

August 2, 2021

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              Want one of the dumbest statements made all time by someone representing the gun industry? Try this brief interview of Mark Oliva, chief spieler for the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF) last week on – where else? – Fox News. He was asked to comment on what has been a shortage of ammunition over the last year as the ammo makers have had some issues catching up with the surge in gun sales.

              Actually, it’s not so much that there’s no ammo on the shelves, but the prices are a lot higher than they were a year ago and don’t look like they will be going back down anytime soon or maybe at all. I used to pay around $30 bucks for a 500-pak of 22-caliber ammo at a nearby Wal Mart store; now they want $42 for the same 500 rounds.

              So why is ammo flying off the shelves? Because everyone is stocking up on all necessity items thanks to Covid-19.  To get this point across the NSSF spieler reminded viewers of how nobody could find toilet paper on the shelves last year.

              “When people get scared,” he said, “they want to make sure they can get their hands on everything they need, so demand always jumps ahead of supply. Last year it was toilet paper, this year it’s ammunition.”

              Now I ‘m sitting here trying to figure this out. People get scared. Fine. People begin to think that in order to protect themselves they want to be sure they have all the things they really need.

              Do we really need toilet paper? Well, kind of, I guess. Although when I lived in Spain in the early 1970’s, it was not uncommon to walk into a public toilet or even into someone’s home bathroom and find the Sunday newspaper cut in strips that allowed it to be used to wipe one’s rear end.

              But this is the United States of America and toilet paper isn’t just something we need, it’s something we buy because it has a soft texture, a matching color and if you really want to get fancy, you can order it with your initials nicely printed on each square.

              Think I’m kidding? Grandma received a carton of monogrammed toilet paper that she ordered from Bloomingdale’s every month. It was still being delivered to her apartment even though she had quietly and peacefully passed on the previous year.

              Bur let’s not kid ourselves. Toilet paper, monogrammed or not, is considered an essential item and it didn’t come as a surprise when it began disappearing from store shelves last year.

              But ammunition?  Since when has ammunition become a product that we all have to have? Since when do I need ammunition to do anything except fool around with one of my guns?
              Oh, I forgot. Darn it – I’m getting old and forgetful. How could I not understand why people need to stock up on ammunition during a worldwide pandemic which is still not yet under control? Because as everyone knows, we don’t need no stinkin’ mask to keep ourselves safe. We need a gun filled with ammunition because that’s why we own guns.

              Except the truth is that guns don’t keep us safe. Yea, yea, I know how every once in a while, some dope barges into a mini-mart, demands all the cash and then finds himself staring down the barrel of a Glock or a Sig. And there’s even a slight chance that the guy hanging around the ATM will think twice about harassing the other guy pulling money out of the machine if the guy using the machine also cranks out his gun.

              But the guy behind the mini-mart counter and the guy at the ATM have to take those guns home at night and that’s when the trouble begins. Because sooner or later he’ll forget to lock the gun away and don’t’ ask me how, and don’t ask me why, but it just so happens that the time he forgot to lock away the gun is when his teenage son wants to show ‘Daddy’s gun’ to a friend.

              You don’t need all that ammo because you really don’t need the gun.

We Know ‘For A Fact’ That The Increase In Gun Violence Is Due To All Those People Buying All Those Guns.

July 20, 2021

mikethegunguy Blogs , 9 Comments

Last night I was watching one of the ‘fake news’ channels, probably CNN, and they did a brief report on shootings last weekend in which somewhere around 150 people were killed. Why has gun violence become so dreadfully high over the last year? Because everyone’s buying a gun to protect themselves from Covid-19.

I have been listening to this more guns bought = more gun violence for the last 16 months and frankly, it’s a load of crap. Or better said, it’s simply a convenient way to explain a somewhat scary bit of human behavior – gun purchasing – which nobody in Gun-control Nation has yet to try to understand.

Ask the average guy who comes walking out of a gun shop with his Glock 17 why he just laid out $500 bucks for a piece of polymer and tempered steel and he’ll tell you right off the bat that he needs to ‘protect’ himself from all those crazies who are going around burning and looting in this city and that.

Of course, the guy doesn’t happen to live anywhere near those cities, but so what? And if you were to point this out to him, he would think for a second and then say, “Well, it could still happen where I live.” And just to make sure you get the point; he would then remind you that he’s only exercising his 2nd-Amendment ‘rights.’

Which is also a load of crap because the 2nd Amendment is an amendment, not a ‘right.’ But anyway, back to how and why legal gun sales are the reason for so much gun crime.

Back in April 1992, I happened to be visiting a gun shop in Baltimore, MD. When I arrived at the shop, the line was around the corner and I had to get the owner, Mel Abrams, to let me in the back door. Mel’s shop usually had an inventory of 200-300 handguns, he told me that he expected to be sold out by early afternoon. He had called his wholesaler that morning and was told that the wholesaler was also cleaned out of guns. What was going on?

The night before was the first night of the riot which erupted in Los Angeles after 4 cops were found innocent of beating the sh*t out of Rodney King. But it wasn’t the riot itself which resulted in every handgun in every gun shop being sold the next day. It was the live video that showed some White guy being dragged out of his truck in Los Angeles and then beaten to a pulp by some real ‘street thugs.’

This video played on virtually every TV in every American home where anyone was watching the news. It was repeated the next several days again, and again, and again.

Gun violence and violence in general did spike from 1992 through 1994. But according to the government, this increase in street mayhem was due to crack cocaine. Nobody said anything about all those guns that had been purchased back in 1992. And by the way, gun violence rates began falling in 1994 and ended up dropping by more than 50% over the next five years.

There was another spike in gun sales after 9-11. Even in my gun shop which was in a town that would never have been a terrorist target for Osama bin Laden or anyone else, my shelves were stripped clean. Know what happened to the gun violence rate in my state when we launched the War on Terror? It didn’t change.

Then there was a much bigger and more sustained increase in gun sales after Obama tried to get a new gun law passed following Sandy Hook. Know how many gun homicides were committed in 2012?  Try 11,622. Know how many gun homicides occurred in 2013 when everyone in Gun-nut Nation knew ‘for a fact’ that Obama was going to take away their guns?  Try 11,208.

How come none of the experts who keep saying that the legal purchase of all those guns in the past year is the reason for so much gun violence hasn’t taken one second to compare this year’s spike in gun sales to spikes in other years?  WTFK, okay?

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Want To Make A Quick Buck? Let’s Start A New Gun Group.

July 12, 2021

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              Want the latest and dumbest scam to come out of Gun-nut Nation to promote guns?  It comes from a guy in Philadelphia, part hip-hop artist, part activist, part internet shyster and the founder of something called Black Guns Matter, which appears to be a website that sells – what else? – shirts, hoodies, hats, all the usual crap.

              The founder of this internet clothing boutique, Maj Toure, says that he’s promoting a ‘Solutionary Lifestyle’ which allows his group to “educate people in urban communities in all 50 states on their 2nd amendment rights and responsibilities through firearms training and education.”

              Along with his t-shirt shop, Toure has also tried to build a political career. The only problem is that even though he ran for an at-large seat in the Philadelphia City Council, running on the Libertarian line, he received one-half of one percent of the vote. Uhhh, he lost. He then got booted out of the Libertarian Party. So what?

              Toure appeared at the 2019 CPAC meeting and told the audience that he supported grass-roots movements against racism but that he didn’t like BLM because all they were doing was raising money for Democratic candidates and Democrats are, to put it bluntly, no good.

              Now Toure’s back at CPAC again at their 2021 CPAC meeting which was held in Texas this past weekend.  This time around, he talked about how gun control equals racism and since he’s opposed to racism, he’s going to fight against gun control.

              Spieling about how liberals are all racists if they support gun control has now landed Toure an occasional appearance on Fox News, where he challenges the Brothers and Sisters about guns, politics, and race. And better yet, he has raised over $400,000 on GoFundMe to support what he claims will be “a 50 state tour to continue informing urban communities–especially youth–about safe and legal firearms knowledge, conflict resolution, and the 2nd amendment.” Conflict resolution using a gun? That’s a good one.

            I’m going to start an organization called Liberals Against Gun Control, or LAGC. I’m going to put up a website, get a 501c3 designation from the IRS, hire a PR firm to book me on all the alt-right media channels and start getting ready to be interviewed on Fox News.

            There’s no question that I’ll get plenty of help from the liberal media which is always looking for a story about how guns attract people who shouldn’t be interested in guns. Last week the Washington Post ran a story about anti-gun Americans who are now buying guns which featured an interview with a couple of Black women who now own Glocks and AR-15’s. The story referenced a story about gun sales in The New York Times. The fact that the NYT story doubled the number of guns actually purchased last year, oh well, oh well.

            The more I think about it, the more I’m going to start my own gun-owning group. And I’m not just going to call it Liberals Against Gun Control, I’m going to call it Jewish Liberals Against Gun Control. There have to be at least three other Jews in the United States besides me who are against the Biden Administration’s effort to take away all our guns. And don’t forget that what happened to all the Jews in Nazi Germany after Hitler took away their guns.

            Could that happen here? Of course it could happen here!  Look at the 2020 election – stolen right out from under our noses. This sh*t has to stop!  Has to stop – right now!!

            Gotta come up with a logo for my new group. After all, I need a logo for my t-shirts and coffee cups that I’ll carry in my online store. Maybe I’ll put an AR-15 inside a Star of David. That’ll work.  How this?

              Perfect. Just perfect.  I’ll send it out right now to the t-shirt company. I’ll use the same outfit that Trump used to produce all his MAGA crap.

              America’s a wonderful country. Start something from nothing which means nothing and will do nothing and you can still make yourself a million bucks.

Critical Race Theory Meets The 2nd Amendment.

June 22, 2021

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              Last week I reviewed a book by Professor Carol Anderson on how the 2nd Amendment has been used to discriminate against Blacks and helps maintain systemic racism, her book being a contribution to critical race theory (CRT) which has generated controversy on both sides of the current political debate.

              In last week’s review, I paid most of my attention to Professor Anderson’s analysis of how and why the 2nd Amendment was inserted into the Bill of Rights. In today’s column I want to look at how Anderson frames an argument about what the 2nd Amendment means to Black Americans today.

              Anderson cites two examples of how racism has been used in the contemporary period to define gun ‘rights’ – California’s  Mulford Law which prohibited carrying guns in public and was signed by then-Governor Ronald Reagan in 1967, and the Federal Gun Control Act which created the national regulatory system for guns which was signed by then-President Lyndon Johnson in 1968.  Both laws which, according to Anderson’s interpretation of CRT, were designed to protect America from violence committed by Blacks.

              The Mulford Law was passed in California after the Black Panthers showed up at the State Capitol, carrying rifles, to protest police brutality and lack of effective policing, particularly in Oakland and Black neighborhoods in L.A. Anderson is absolutely correct in pointing out that much of the political rhetoric and posturing which accompanied Mulford Law was not-so-thinly-veiled messaging about how Whites needed to protect themselves from crime and violence committed by Blacks.

              Anderson basically makes the same argument about the political and racial context surrounding the debates and ultimate passage of GCA68, quoting Michael Waldman’s judgement that the law was defining gun ownership as a “white prerogative” because the categories which defined unlawful behavior, lumped under the rubric of ‘dangerous people,’ tended to be behaviors that allegedly occurred much more frequently among Blacks than among Whites.

              It was in the aftermath of GCA68, however, that gun regulations began to clearly show a racist slant. I am referring to the spread of concealed-carry permits (CCW) which were issued in only 9 states without any kind of police discretion as late as 1986. As of this year, there are now only 8 states where the cops can deny a CCW application without cause, and every one of those states happens to have large, inner-city Black neighborhoods where it is simply understood that Blacks don’t need to waste time trying to get a CCW license because it won’t be issued, whether they meet the legal qualifications or not.

              States like California, New York, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland,  Massachusetts Rhode Island – have cities with high levels of gun violence but are also cities where the cops don’t want anyone to own a legal gun. Want to protect yourself by carrying a legal gun when you walk down the street? Move to Wichita, KS or Des Moines, IA. Blacks can get licensed for CCW in those cities, no questions asked.

              The fact that Anderson could write an entire book to show how the 2nd Amendment has been used to discriminate against Blacks and never seem to be aware of the racial differential in issuance of CCW licenses tells me that her understanding of guns, gun laws and CRT represents nothing more than an ability to go on the internet and do a bibliographical search. Another expert writing about gun violence who wouldn’t know one end of a gun from the other end.

              But here’s the real problem with thinking about gun violence within the context of CRT. Would it be better if the laws on gun ownership and gun access were completely color-blind, thus making it easier for Blacks to buy and own guns? Isn’t it bad enough right now that a White guy can walk into a gun shop, buy a Glock 17 with 5 extra hi-cap mags, and walk around town with the gun just because he passed a two-minute background check?

              Want to get rid of the systemic racism that defines how we try to control the ownership and use of guns? Why don’t we make everyone equal and simply say that nobody can own guns?

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The Dumbest Gun Law Passed This Year.

June 11, 2021

mikethegunguy Blogs , , 4 Comments

              I used to think that the dumbest gun law ever produced came from Matt Gaetz who, when he was a State Senator in Florida, introduced a law (which went nowhere) that would have allowed patrons who were shot by someone in a gun-free zone to sue the owner of the property who had made his space gun free.

              But the Governor of Missouri, Mike Parson, is about to sign into law a bill which is even dumber than the law put out there by child-molester Gaetz. This is a law called the ‘2nd-Amendment Preservation Act,’ which prohibits the police in Missouri from enforcing federal laws which would be “considered infringements on the people’s right to keep and bear arms, as guaranteed by Amendment II of the Constitution of the United States.”

              Exactly what laws are they talking about? The most egregious infringements on gun ‘rights’ in Missouri would be any federal law which would result in “any registration or tracking of firearms, firearm accessories, or ammunition.”

              So, if a local police department shows up at a crime scene, let’s say a murder, and finds a gun next to the corpse which was evidently used to kill the guy, according to this new law the cops can’t ask the ATF to trace the gun in order to figure out who may have actually committed the crime.

              And why do the good people of Missouri need such a law? Because according to the Governor’s office, this law will “empower people to protect themselves.” The Governor’s spokesperson, Kelli Jones, actually said this. She actually stated those exact words.

              In 2019, the most recent year for which we have data, Missouri was one of 7 states with a murder rate in double digits, specifically the rate was 10.23 murders per 100,000 residents. There were only 4 states in 2019 which suffered from a higher rate of murders where the killer used a gun. So why not make it harder for the cops to figure out who pulled the trigger when they find a dead body on one side of the street with his head blown off and then find the gun on the other side of the street?

              Obviously, the guy who got his head blown off wouldn’t have been a murder victim at all if he had taken the trouble to ‘empower’ and protect himself, right? And how could this guy have empowered himself to make sure he didn’t get his head blown off by someone else?  That’s simple. All he needed to do was go out and get himself a gun.

              I can certainly understand why the head of Missouri’s gun-control group, MOMS, would issue a statement calling this law something with no benefit at all. But that’s not completely true, because after all, as the fear of Covid-19 abates and less people feel they can protect themselves from the virus by buying a gun, the guys who own gun shops in Missouri will need to find some way to boost sales.

              Know how many guns were purchased in Missouri last month? Try 40,192.  Know how many guns were sold in Missouri in April? Try 51,356.  In March it was 65,739.  So, over the last three months, gun sales in Missouri have dropped by almost 40%! That’s no good. No good at all.

              If it weren’t for the idiot state legislator, Jered Taylor, who sponsored this bill, and the idiot Governor, Mike Parson, who signed the bill, the gun business in Missouri might collapse, and then all those state residents who still need to empower themselves to keep themselves safe would be sh*t out of luck.

              Maybe what those poor folks would have to do is sneak into someone’s house when they’re not around and swipe one of their guns. And if the neighbor reports the theft to the cops and the cops want to trace the gun, then the local cops will also be sh*t out of luck.

              Missouri’s known as the ‘show me’ state. Want to show me a law that is dumber than this new gun law? 

Why Are Guns Lethal: 9781536814002: Reference Books @ Amazon.com

Another Gun Expert Joins The Debate And Gets It Completely Wrong.

June 6, 2021

mikethegunguy Blogs , , 1 Comment

              It has to be my fault.  There’s simply no way that a media organization as sophisticated and professional as 24/7 Wall Street could do a story about guns and get it so completely wrong. So, I have to assume that although I have described what the FBI-NICS numbers mean at least two dozen times, obviously I’m doing it in a way that simply doesn’t allow the reporter who wrote about guns for 24/7 to get what I’m saying at all.

              Yesterday, 24/7 ran a story with a headline which said there was one state which already racked up more than 5 millions gun sales this year.  One state has already accounted for the purchase of 5 million guns?  In 2019, the total for all guns manufactured in the United States was 6.5 million, of which 200,000 were exported and the rest were sold here. Now I know the Pandemic increased gun sales exponentially in 2020, but how could one state, identified as Illinois, register more gun sales in five months this year than the total gun sales for the entire United States in 2019?

              In fact, it didn’t happen. It didn’t come close to happening.  So, I guess this means that for the umpteenth time I have to explain the meaning of those monthly FBI-NICS numbers that the reporter for 24/7 Wall Street didn’t understand at all. Here goes.

              In May, the state of Illinois connected up to the FBI-NICS call center 998,926 times. In April the number of calls from Illinois to the FBI-NICS desk was 955,439; March was 1,427,917; February was 902,029, and January was 1,002,118. Round it off and you get 5.3 million background checks for residents of Illinois.

              There’s only one little problem. Ready? Of those 5,3 million calls, roughly 245,000 (I’m rounding off) were for background checks covering the purchase of guns. The rest of those calls, the other 5.2 million calls, were for approval of new gun permits, rechecks of previously issued permits, and guns redeemed out of pawn. Illinois doesn’t yet require background checks for person-to-person private sales which in California, for example, accounts for another 7,000 – 8,000 background checks each and every month.

              What the FBI-NICS numbers really show, if the reporter for 24/7 Wall Street would like to know what he is writing about, is that the great 2020 surge in Pandemic gun sales is, like the Pandemic, beginning to slowly but surely fade away. In May 2020, Americans bought 955,278 handguns, last month that number dropped 20% to 767,314.

              The reason the reporter for 24/7 Wall Street made such a big goof is because he looked at the wrong NICS dataset published by the FBI. He based his story on the dataset which lists calls received by the NICS call center for each state but doesn’t break down the reason for the call: NICS Firearm Checks: Month/Year by State — FBI.  What he should have been referencing was the dataset which shows not only the number of calls per state, but the reason why the calls were made: NICS Firearm Checks: Month/Year by State/Type — FBI. 

              Unfortunately, the writer of this article is not just some kid reporter. He’s Douglas McIntyre, not only Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer and Editor-in-Chief of 24/7 Wall Street, but “an expert on corporate finance, the automotive industry, media companies and international finance. He has edited articles on national demographics, sports, personal income, and travel.” A Magna Cum Laude graduate from Harvard College, obviously McIntyre’s choice of major at America’s oldest University didn’t include a course on guns.

              Am I surprised that someone as educated and professionally experienced as Douglas McIntyre could write a story about the gun business and get it so utterly and completely wrong? To the contrary, I have to assume that his sudden interest in guns reflects an awareness that with the current political alignment in D.C., we might actually see a gun-control bill debated and even passed on Capitol Hill.

              Let’s just hope that if such a debate occurs, that our Congressional friends supporting a new law to reduce gun violence will rely on sources more accurate than 24/7 Wall Street.

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