Everytown misrepresentations on guns

[DaleA]

Yeah, who here is surprised about that.

Still, I ran across their,
"what we in the Royal Navy used to refer to as LIES"
(I plagiarized this from a book I'm reading because it seemed so appropriate)

in an article about a two-year old who apparently picked up a gun laying loose in the house and fired it and the bullet struck the parents. The headline of the article reads:

A 2-Year-Old In Maine Got Ahold Of Loaded Handgun And Shot Both Of His Parents

which makes it sound like the kid went off on a shooting spree instead of a single discharge from the firearm.

In the article there is some info from Everytown and I went to the Everytown web site to see if the info was still there (I didn't think it would be) but it is still up:

1. Each year, 1.2 million online ads offering firearms for sale are listed that would not legally require a background check to be completed.
2. Nearly 1 in 9 prospective buyers who respond to ads from unlicensed sellers would not pass a background check, a rate seven times higher than the denial rate at licensed gun stores or in other contexts where background checks are required.
3. Following an Armslist online sale, the face-to-face transaction can be completed in under three minutes.
4. In states that require background checks on all gun sales, 84 percent of unlicensed sellers told prospective purchasers they would need to undergo a background check prior to the sale. But in states without these laws, only 6 percent of unlicensed sellers indicated a background check would be needed.

I am responsible for bolding the points I found particularly egregious.

The Everytown site can be found here:
https://everytownresearch.org/report/unchecked-an-investigation-of-the-online-firearm-marketplace/

The article about the two-year old can be found here:
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crim...vid=6b6d1d465b574d5ab564a74c87473112#comments

 

[44 AMP]

That, Mansel, is what we in the Royal Navy call a LIE."
Cmmdr Clement to his aid, in the 1983 Monty Python movie YELLOWBEARD.


In the interest of precision, and precision is the way to chop apart these kinds of things, nothing Everytown said that you quoted in your post mentioned any actual LAWs. So you might consider editing your title.

What they did talk about that you reported all dealt with percentages of people, apparently from some uncredited surveys or pointing out how sales are being done without background checks.

Point by point, I'd say this...

1. Each year, 1.2 million online ads offering firearms for sale are listed that would not legally require a background check to be completed.

So?? This is possibly a valid fact. 1.2 million people OBEYING existing law. What a shock!

2. Nearly 1 in 9 prospective buyers who respond to ads from unlicensed sellers would not pass a background check, a rate seven times higher than the denial rate at licensed gun stores or in other contexts where background checks are required.

Vague numbers with out any source cited. Does make me curious how they know what percentage of people would fail a background check, if no check was done on them??

3. Following an Armslist online sale, the face-to-face transaction can be completed in under three minutes.

Again, So?? Private sales obeying all applicable laws don't have to take long, if the applicable laws don't require background checks or filling out any forms. They are implying that being able to do it is somehow a bad thing. But, then again, that IS their agenda...

4. In states that require background checks on all gun sales, 84 percent of unlicensed sellers told prospective purchasers they would need to undergo a background check prior to the sale. But in states without these laws, only 6 percent of unlicensed sellers indicated a background check would be needed.

Again, the obvious, stated to imply something bad. Very few sellers will tell prospective buyers that they require a background check when the law does not require it.

Everytown is following the pattern established by earlier gun control groups using actual lies, partial truths and the omission of relevant truth to promote their agenda.

Handgun Control Inc., which later changed its name to "The Coalition to Prevent Gun Violence" put out statistics for years covering "Death of a Child due to a handgun". It was a shockingly large number. They were unmasked by a "defector" showing how they included suicides, police shootings, gang on gang shootings, and perhaps some actual accidents. Anyone under the age of 25 killed with any firearm went into their database as "death of a child due to a handgun".

Unfortunately, they just kept putting out the numbers and the mainstream press accepted them as if they were gospel.

As I heard it, some of the people involved in that gun control group were also the people who did a news report on the dangers of pickup trucks exploding gas tanks, and used specially rigged trucks to explode.....
Those individuals are most likely retired by now, but their ideological children press on and when ignorance rules, they prosper.

personally, I will not go to their website, besides the waste of my time, if there's any possibility of them profiting from someone viewing their site, I will not contribute to that.

 

[DaleA]

"-what we call a lie"

Many thanks for telling me where the quote is from, I appreciate it.

 

[Tom Servo]

Investigators then ran public records requests on would-be buyers who responded. Investigators reviewed the records of over 430 individuals who expressed an interest in purchasing the firearms. On average

They don't explain what database they queried. What's more, they don't explain how they got enough information on the prospective buyers to run a proper check.

I don't buy this at all, especially considering what I know of their methods. Back in 2007, Michael Bloomberg (founder of Everytown) was running an outfit called Mayors Against Illegal Guns. They hired private investigators to conduct straw purchases at out-of-state gun shops. If the purchase was successful, he'd sue them in New York's Southern District court.

Most of the dealers couldn't afford hire legal representation to fly to New York and fight the mayor's office, so they settled. The whole thing was really problematic.

It became a big controversy in Atlanta. One major dealer refused to settle and spent several years in litigation. They made a point of keeping it in the local press. It highlighted a number of issues:

• how exactly did the straw purchases take place, since they weren't filmed?
• how does hiring someone across state lines to commit felonies not trigger a RICO prosecution?
• why were none of these cases referred to the ATF or local authorities for criminal prosecution?
• how was it not a conflict of interest for the mayor to be running an advocacy group out of his own office, using taxpayer funds?

The operation was quietly shut down, but several gun dealers were driven out of business by the costs. The ATF apparently wasn't happy at all, but they were told to leave it alone.

On that last bullet point, there were serious problems with MAIG. They snagged former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge as their big spokesguy. He got one look at their agenda, realized they were against pretty much ALL guns, and publicly quit. Several of their pet mayors ended up in jail.

What was weird was, a dozen or so mayors were listed as members on the website who had to scramble and emphatically tell their constituents they weren't members at all. Turns out, he actually just put their names and faces on the site.

So, yeah. No. I'm not buying anything that comes from the Bloomberg axis. That includes Everytown, Moms Demand Action (long story, but Shannon Watts is literally a fictional persona), and The Trace.

 

[Aguila Blanca]

I did NOT know that Shannon Watts is a fictional creation. The uber-reliable Wikipedia seems to think she's a real person.

 

[Tom Servo]

I did NOT know that Shannon Watts is a fictional creation.

Her real name is Shannon Troughton. She served as director of public relations for Mel Carnahan when he was governor of Missouri in the 1990s and wrote copy for some of his anti-gun speeches. She moved to Indiana, where she did work for the Democratic party under the name Shannon Marmion.

She ran a public-relations firm called VoxPop, which represented companies like BP and Monsanto. When she became friends with Michael Bloomberg is unclear, but in 2012 she changed her persona to Shannon Watts and became a gun-control advocate.

She claimed that she'd been a stay-at-home mom who never did anything political prior to the Newtown shooting. As the story goes, she just started a humble Facebook page to address her fears of school shootings, and...oh, look! In 24 hours, she had chapters with offices already rented in several cities, t-shirts and merchandise manufactured, a slick corporate website, and photo opportunities with Michael Bloomberg. That must prove she's running a righteous cause, right?

The idea was carefully marketed to left-wing media outlets who either didn't question it or didn't care. But someone in Indiana recognized her, did a LinkedIn search on her profile and found the names Shannon Marmion and Shannon Troughton both redirected to the Shannon Watts profile.

She kept her public appearances carefully limited to situations in which nobody was likely to ask her about it. She did an interview with NPR around 2015, and someone confronted her about it. She cut the interview short, and NPR later had to clarify that her backstory about no prior political work was false.

 

[Aguila Blanca]

^^^ Good to know. Thank you for the back story.

 

[mehavey]

>
> With five days to go in the year, the Gun Violence Archive found that 6,023
> U.S. children 17 years old or younger have been killed or hurt in gunfire this
> year, surpassing the 5,708 killed or hurt 2021.
>
https://www.aol.com/more-6-000-children-killed-214448260.html
https://abcnews.go.com/US/6000-children-killed-hurt-gunfire-2022-report/story?id=95833392

Has anyone got the actual data/sources they pulled this "figure" out of? Even so . . .
https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/ (which they cite) fails to support their own statement.


I'm particularly fascinated by the ridiculously low "defensive" use damning with faint praise numbers

 

[LeverGunFan]

>
> With five days to go in the year, the Gun Violence Archive found that 6,023
> U.S. children 17 years old or younger have been killed or hurt in gunfire this
> year, surpassing the 5,708 killed or hurt 2021.
>
https://www.aol.com/more-6-000-children-killed-214448260.html
https://abcnews.go.com/US/6000-children-killed-hurt-gunfire-2022-report/story?id=95833392

Has anyone got the actual data/sources they pulled this "figure" out of? Even so . . .
https://www.gunviolencearchive.org/ (which they cite) fails to support their own statement.


I'm particularly fascinated by the ridiculously low "defensive" use damning with faint praise numbers

I'm always suspicious of any "statistics" that lump several results together as they do here; there is a significant difference between being killed versus being injured. The obvious intent is to exaggerate the number of child deaths, similar to lumping homicides together with suicides to exaggerate the number of murders. That indicates to me that the goal is not to inform but to misinform. The data should be listed as a rate, for example as the number of deaths per 100,000, so that population increases are accounted for. The data should also be listed by cause such as homicide, suicide or accidental. Clearly they see the solution to all these deaths is to "ban all guns" versus suicide prevention or reducing gang and criminal activity.

 

[Tom Servo]

Has anyone got the actual data/sources they pulled this "figure" out of?

No, because they stopped sharing raw data a few years back when they had to pull their "school shooting" stats.

They decided that we had to believe there was a school shooting every day since Newtown, so they did terrible violence to the numbers. The founder had a forum on Reddit in which he promoted his ideas, and they gave him an echo chamber. (This guy has no background on this or any related issue.) Even the President quoted it. Then a few people, including myself, were invited by the site administrators to review it. I went through the first four dozen or so cases and found the following:

• four negligent discharges by security personnel in which nobody was injured
• two suicides in parking lots
• some broken windows on a bus that MAY have been caused by a pellet gun
• four gang-related shootings that occurred NEAR school grounds after hours
• ten "reports" of shots fired that could not be verified.

Three of those last ten were all in the same Colorado suburb, in the same week. Three school shootings? How come that wasn't headline news? Turns out, I did some digging and found a local statement made by the sheriff. It was the first week of hunting season and he'd really appreciate it if parents understood that they might hear distant gunshots.

But add it up, and that's almost HALF their data that needed to be thrown out. The whole methodology was so broken I just stopped there. Others found far more. The founder closed down the forum and site administrators deleted the public posts critical of it.

This is the problem with gun-control "studies" (and I'm looking right at you, Josh Sugarmann): they start with the conclusion they want and work back from there. They claim the mantle of SCIENCE, and they know the media won't ask pesky questions about the data.

(In fact, they want it so badly, they're willing to overlook its deficiencies. That's why they trot out Kellerman's conclusions every few years in the hopes we've forgotten how broken his work was.)

Yes, violence committed with firearms is up the last three years. Violence in all categories is up. That's what happens when we have civil unrest. That's what happens when we shut down the economy, force people to become hermits in their own homes, and cause massive amounts of financial damage. The numbers coincide with a marked rise in substance abuse and frustration, and they're not surprising. But the GVA doesn't take those things into account. They just run a news tracker, massage the data, and report it to a media that eats it up in the name of ratings.

 

[44 AMP]

Wasn't Sugarmann one of the NBC guys (way back when) who rigged pickup trucks to blow up to "support" their claim about how dangerous the fuel tank design was???

leopard .....spots....

 

[Tom Servo]

Not sure about that, but he's the guy who runs the Violence Policy Center. They publish "studies" with lovely titles like Concealed Carry Killers and 50-Caliber Carnage. Nobody actually checks his data before running breathless news stories on it. Most of it is buried behind recursive paywalls, but if you follow his citations, you'll find he just references his own prior studies in hopes nobody will actually check. It would be merely annoying, except he's pretty much the self-appointed "science" guy for the gun-control lobby.

He's the one who raised a stink about "kitchen table" FFL's back in the 90s and got the Clinton administration to ban them. Strangely enough, he holds such an FFL himself. Despite it having falsified (and apparently being told to falsify it) the application, despite not being properly zoned, and despite not being in the business of selling firearms, the ATF keeps renewing it.

He invented the whole idea of "assault weapons" in the late 1980s. To wit:

Assault weapons—just like armor-piercing bullets, machine guns, and plastic firearms—are a new topic. The weapons’ menacing looks, coupled with the public’s confusion over fully automatic machine guns versus semi-automatic assault weapons—anything that looks like a machine gun is assumed to be a machine gun—can only increase the chance of public support for restrictions on these weapons.

Fun fact: he also started a false-flag site called Smoke and Thunder a few years back. It was supposed to be made by two young, hipster millennials who were tired of stodgy "old guys" being in charge of gun culture and so on. They cut-and-pasted articles from other gun blogs and forums, including my own and Tamara Keel's, and then listed us as "editors."

Someone found the site, and there was some kerfuffle on the forums about it. Nobody knew who these kids were, I certainly wasn't an editor on their site, and they were using my material without permission. Needless to say, they didn't respond to emails. Then someone checked the site registration, and it was owned by the VPC. Nice. They quickly took it down after being found out.

Just a stand-up sorta guy, really.