I have a big big issue with the background check law not being passed. Nothing is wrong doing a background check on folks for a gun. Places do a background check be4 you hire folks. Bad move by the senate.
It comes down to resources in the BATFE and the FBI. They would have to hire hundreds to police that, hundreds more to do the checks and still not make a difference because people who cannot legally buy a gun will not submit to a background check anyhow.
winner,winner chicken dinner.
It was all political posturing.
obuma
They don't prosecute the people who fail background checks now
ing LOLOLOLOLOL
What happens to a president who romps to reelection, channels a national tragedy that sparked coast-to-coast outrage into a deeply personal crusade, then fails to get a measure backed by nine out of ten Americans through the Senate, where his party holds a majority? Thanks to the NRA-fueled defeat of a bill that might have mildly tightened limits on gun sales, President Barack Obama is learning the hard way.
For the families of those killed or wounded by gun violence and who watched with judging eyes as the Senate killed the measure by a vote of 54-46 (it needed a supermajority of 60 votes to pass) what to make of the vote was an easy call.
“Shame on you!” Patricia Maisch shouted from the visitors gallery above the Senate floor.
Maisch, a grandmotherly figure who disarmed the shooter in the Tucson carnage that nearly claimed the life of former congresswoman Gabby Giffords, was happy to elaborate as reporters swarmed her after the vote. “I decided I could not sit still,” she said. “They have no souls, they have no compassion.”
But on Wednesday, they had the votes.
That’s Message One for Obama from this stinging legislative defeat: Having emotion and the majority on your side isn’t enough. NRA leader Wayne LaPierre, after all, didn't even need to show up.
The knock on Obama has often been that he’s Mr. Spock, viewing his approach as the most logical and assuming that logic will trump the other’s side’s arguments and emotions. But only the most cynical observers will argue that the president didn’t take this fight personally – with frequent flashes of very public anger and anguish ever since the slaughter of 20 schoolchildren at Sandy Hook Elementary. And supporters of the legislation deployed the families of the slain as lobbyists in the weeks leading up to the vote.
Moreover, as the White House never tired of pointing out, polls show roughly 90 percent of Americans support expanded background checks.
"I will put everything I've got into this, and so will Joe," Obama promised in January, with Vice President Biden at his side. "But I tell you, the only way we can change is if the American people demand it."
In the end, though, four red-state Democrats joined 41 of the Senate's 45 Republicans to defeat the bill. Why stick their necks out for legislation whose death in the Republican-led House of Representatives was essentially foreordained?
"It came down to politics -- the worry that that vocal minority of gun owners would come after them in future elections. They worried that the gun lobby would spend a lot of money and paint them as anti-Second Amendment," Obama said in a passionate assessment in the White House Rose Garden after the vote. "And obviously, a lot of Republicans had that fear, but Democrats had that fear, too. And so they caved to the pressure, and they started looking for an excuse -- any excuse -- to vote 'no.'"
That would seem to bode ill for Obama in the early months of a second term. A reelected president at perhaps the height of his persuasive powers couldn't even get his own party in line behind this widely popular measure.
Obama's 2012 campaign juggernaut, overhauled and renamed Organizing for Action -- an unprecedented grassroots effort devoted entirely to advancing his agenda -- didn't tip the balance. There will be hard votes in the future on immigration, on taxes and spending, maybe on energy and climate change. He's doomed!
Message Two: No, he's not.
Republican Senator John Cornyn of Texas, a staunch conservative and fierce Obama critic, told Yahoo News that Wednesday's vote was a fight over the Second Amendment. "I wouldn't think it has any broader implication" for Obama's agenda, he said.
So no spillover effect on immigration? "I don't think so," Cornyn said.
Sure, former President George W. Bush's second term never really recovered from his failed push to partly privatize Social Security. But that effort was powerfully unpopular, including among Republicans, while the goal of tamping down gun violence is broadly popular.
Which brings up Message Three: Obama's push on gun safety has suffered a terrible setback, but it's far from over.
Surrounded in the Rose Garden by parents of slain Sandy Hook schoolchildren, Obama never said the words "2014 mid-term elections." He didn't need to.
"We can do more if Congress gets its act together. And if this Congress refuses to listen to the American people and pass common-sense gun legislation, then the real impact is going to have to come from the voters," he declared. "You need to let your representatives in Congress know that you are disappointed, and that if they don’t act this time, you will remember come election time."
Maybe, but Message Four is that this White House needs to get better organized.
Democrats from states with large gun-owning populations complained privately that the Obama operation never seemed to know how to talk to gun owners. Several told Yahoo News that Obama hasn't really moved past his 2008 depiction of small-town Americans who "cling to guns or religon." Gun rights-favoring media, too, complained about the message.
There was a weird, telling little moment in the debate that highlighted the White House's struggle.
In early April, top Obama pollster Joel Benenson wrote a New York Times op-ed describing a poll his firm conducted that found, as he described it, that Americans don't really know what the country's gun laws actually say. Benenson was trying to beat back the core NRA argument against new gun laws: That authorities must enforce existing gun laws. But his column sent another message: That Team Obama had not really scrutinized the NRA argument until April.
making it harder to buy guns from league sources will only end up boosting the so-called "black market" imho.
"We can do more if Congress gets its act together. And if this Congress refuses to listen to the American people and pass common-sense gun legislation, then the real impact is going to have to come from the voters," he declared. "You need to let your representatives in Congress know that you are disappointed, and that if they don’t act this time, you will remember come election time."Sounds as if the people in Colorado are taking his advice after their new gun control measures were passed, the recalls of those voting in favor of said measures are up and running.
I'm in Denver now, and it's so ing cold and there's a blizzard going on, no one is going to be shooting up a theater tonight, but if they did they wouldn't hit anyone.
senators who voted against b/g checks know it won't cost them anything, there's no accountability anymore for the plutocrats.
TBH, the same happened with the creation of the Department of Homeland security. If people were getting shot up by Muslims, this would have a greater chance of passing.
I think folks should not buy a guy easy as buying a microwave. Now I am for every American having a right to own a gun but in the legal sense.
Can you back this statement up with any sort of empirical evidence?
So then they wouldn't go to gun shows then because they would have to submit to a background check which is the entire point. So now we have come to 'there is no point to doing background checks whatsoever.'
Sure can. And this is only in CA.
http://articles.latimes.com/2013/jan...-guns-20130130
SACRAMENTO — California authorities are empowered to seize weapons owned by convicted felons and people with mental illness, but staff shortages and funding cuts have left a backlog of more than 19,700 people to disarm, a law enforcement official said Tuesday.
Those gun owners have roughly 39,000 firearms, said Stephen Lindley, chief of the Bureau of Firearms for the state Department of Justice, testifying at a joint legislative hearing. His office lacks enough staff to confiscate all the weapons, which are recorded in the state's Armed Prohibited Persons database, he said.
You act like the majority of gun shows don't run background checks and are probably running with Obama's claim of 40% of gun purchases are made without a background check. If that's what you're using you are far off as shown here.
http://m.washingtonpost.com/blogs/fa...b712_blog.html
But keep pretending you are well versed in the world of guns, it makes for good entertainment.
So the people responsible for confiscating the now illegal firearms that were obtained legally are the same people responsible for processing the background check?
Last edited by Th'Pusher; 04-17-2013 at 10:09 PM.
point is there is a lack of resources.
So when you sold your ar15 and met the buyer at a local gun dealer to have the background check performed as you claimed, how long did the background check take to process?
I have no idea as I'm not the licensed FFL who makes the call to NICS from the gun shop. We both gave all our info to the FFL and I took the money and left. The guy had to at least wait 10 days per CA law before he could pick up his gun new from the FFL.
So, when I claimed that 40% of guns were sold without a background check, you rebutted that citing numbers that were closer to 20% of guns being sold without a background check. The bill that was voted down today excluded private transfers for family and friends, so at best, it would have increased background checks by, what 15%? This 15% increase in background checks is somehow logistically unattainable? Sorry, I'm not buying that without some more concrete empirical evidence. The burden of proof for this is on DMC/CC who glommed onto the claim without any supporting information.
So they would get guns elsewhere. You shut down corners, pimps, s and drug dealers will go elsewhere. Is the goal to legitimize gun shows?
Obviously the majority of the Senate didn't agree with your point.
The numbers you're using are bull . I have no reason to address bull stats. Get meaningful stats and then to the math on the costs.
you made the claim that the additional background checks were unenforceble due to resources. It's your burden of proof to back up that claim. If the proposed legislation were to go into effect, what would be the burden on the agencies responsible for the additional background checks?“The law already requires licensed gun dealers to run background checks, and over the last 14 years that’s kept 1.5 million of the wrong people from getting their hands on a gun. But it’s hard to enforce that law when as many as 40 percent of all gun purchases are conducted without a background check.”
--President Obama, remarks on gun violence, Jan. 16, 2013
“Studies estimate that nearly 40 percent of all gun sales are made by private sellers who are exempt from this requirement.”
--“Now Is the Time: The president’s plan to protect our children and our communities by reducing gun violence,” released Jan. 16
“That’s why we need, and I’ve recommended to the president, universal background checks. Studies show that up to 40 percent of the people -- and there’s no -- let me be honest with you again, which I’ll get to in a moment. Because of the lack of the ability of federal agencies to be able to even keep records, we can’t say with absolute certainty what I’m about to say is correct. But the consensus is about 40 percent of the people who buy guns today do so outside the NICS [National Instant Criminal Background Check] system, outside the background check system.”
--Vice President Biden, remarks to the U.S. Conference of Mayors, Jan. 17
Regular readers of this column know that we are often su ious when politicians inject the phrase “up to” before citing a statistic. That’s because it often suggests the politician is picking the upper value in a range of possibilities.
A reader expressed deep skepticism of this 40-percent figure when Obama used it. We were further struck by Biden’s admission he could not say with “absolute certainty” that it was correct. So let’s investigate.
The Facts
The White House says the figure comes from a 1997 Ins ute of Justice report, written by Philip Cook of Duke University and Jens Ludwig of the University of Chicago. This study is based on data collected from a survey in 1994, just the Brady law requirements for background checks was coming into effect. (In fact, the questions concerned purchases in 1993 and 1994, while Brady law went into effect in early 1994.) In other words, this is a really old figure.
The data is available for researchers to explore at the Interuniversity consortium on political and social research (ICPSR) at the University of Michigan. Digging deeper, we find that the survey sample was just 251 people. (The survey was done by telephone, using a random-digit-dial method, with a response rate of 50 percent.) With this sample size, the 95 percent confidence interval will be plus or minus 6 percentage points.
Moreover, when asked if he or she bought from a licensed firearms dealer, the possible answers included “probably was/think so” and “probably not,” leaving open the possibility the purchaser was mistaken. (The “probably not” answers were counted as “no.”)
When all of the “yes” and “probably was” answers were added together, that left 35.7 percent of respondents indicating they did not receive the gun from a licensed firearms dealer. Rounding up gets you to 40 percent, though as we noted the survey sample is so small it could also be rounded down to 30 percent.
Moreover, when gifts, inheritances and prizes are added in, then the number shrinks to 26.4 percent. (The survey showed that nearly 23.8 percent of the people surveyed obtained their gun either as a gift or inherited it, and about half of them believed a licensed firearms dealer was the source.)
Cook and Ludwig, in a lengthier 1996 study of the data for the Police Foundation, acknowledge the ambiguity in the answers, but gave their best estimate as a range of 30 to 40 percent for transactions in the “off-the-books” secondary market. (The shorter 1997 study cited by the White House does not give a range, but instead says “approximately 60 percent of gun acquisitions” involved a licensed dealer.)
Interestingly, while people often speak of the “gun show loophole,” the data in this 1994 survey shows that only 3.9 percent of firearm purchases were made at gun shows.
Ludwig acknowledged that “our estimate is clearly not perfect.” He said that a larger sample size would have provided a more precise estimate of off-the-books transactions, but he and Cook were not involved in the design stage of the survey. He added that one reason why the data is so old is because the federal government has generally stopped funding such research.
“While there is no perfect estimate in social science, we’d have a better estimate for this proportion had the federal government not decided to get out of the business of supporting research on guns and gun violence several years ago,” he said.
Ludwig and Cook were among the social scientists who signed a letter to Biden earlier this month calling on ending barriers to firearms research. The letter includes an interesting figure, comparing how many National Ins ute of Health awards have been given for firearms research versus infectious diseases.
Major NIH research awards and ulative morbidity for select conditions in the US, 1973–2012
Condition Total cases NIH research awards
Cholera 400 212
Diphtheria 1337 56
Polio 266 129
Rabies 65 89
Total of four diseases 2068 486
Firearm injuries >4,000,000 3
One of the executive orders signed by Obama on Jan. 16 directed the Centers for Disease Control to research the causes and prevention of gun violence, based on a legal analysis that congressional restrictions on spending money to advocate for gun control does not apply to such inquiries.
There is a bit of irony here. While the 40-percent figure appears overstated and out of date, it remains the most cited statistic on the secondary market because foes of gun control have thwarted extensive research on guns. Advocates of gun controls thus continue to rely on a flawed statistic nearly two decades old.
Cook and Ludwig, in a paper that released this month at a gun-violence conference hosted by the John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, found that there appears to be little or no impact from the Brady law in reducing the homicide rate, even though government officials (such as Obama) routinely tout the number of people prevented from buying guns because of background checks.
“One explanation is that the type of person who is disqualified from legally buying a gun but shops at FFL [dealer with a federal firearms license] anyway tends to be at relatively low risk for misusing a gun,” Cook and Ludwig write in “The Limited Impact of the Brady Act: Evaluation and Implications.”
So is there any other, recent data that might provide some insight into the impact of the off-the-books gun market?
Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research, will report data from a 2004 survey of inmates in state prisons in a chapter in a book led “Reducing Gun Violence in America,” to be published Jan. 28 by Johns Hopkins Press.
The offenders were incarcerated from crimes committed with handguns, and this is how they reported how they obtained the guns:
Licensed gun dealer: 11 percent
Friends or family: 39.5 percent
“The street:” 37.5 percent
Stolen gun: 9.9 percent
Gun show/Flea market: 1.7 percent
In other words, only a relatively small percentage was purchased from licensed dealers. Obama’s proposal on universal background checks, however, allows for “limited, common-sense exceptions for cases like certain transfers between family members and temporary transfers for hunting and sporting purposes.”
The Pinocchio Test
We are faced with a conundrum here. We generally believe politicians should use the most up-to-date and relevant information available, but congressional foes of gun control have made it difficult to improve on obviously stale information.
The small sample size is also a serious problem, but again, roadblocks have made it difficult to do a more comprehensive survey.
At the same time, President Obama and the White House gun-violence plan act as if the information is fresh and relevant; it has also been repeated as current information by the news media. The Obama gun-violence plan cites “studies,” but in fact these all are merely riffs on the same, relatively small survey taken nearly two decades ago. Generally, we would rule such claims are deserving of a Pinocchio or two.
Vice President Biden, meanwhile, deserves kudos for acknowledging that the information is suspect and may not be entirely accurate. He at least frames it with some caveats, which is proper.
So, we are going to take a wait-and-see approach with this statistic. Going forward, gun-control advocates should be much more upfront about its problems, especially the fact that it is old information. The 30-to-40 percent range that Cook and Ludwig first deduced should be the norm, not the “up to 40 percent” claim. Moreover, advocates should routinely acknowledge this is stale information—which they are certainly free to blame on gun-industry lobbying.
We will be watching, and urge readers to keep track as well.
There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)
Posting Permissions
Reply With Quote
