There was a letter to the editor in a regional (Midcoast) weekly newspaper recently that included something that set off my BS Detector: "Each year, 5,500 guns are sold and shipped from Maine to Massachusetts without background checks. This is because Massachusetts has closed this loophole." I Googled it, but keep ending up with the purported 5,500 denials of gun purchases because of NICS checks since 1998.
I suspect the writer has pulled the figure from some warm dark location on the lower posterior portion of his/her anatomy, and I'm going to challenge him (or her; it's somebody from Camden) to cite a source. It also sounds a lot like the claim about how NICS has blocked 5,500 gun sales to prohibited persons in Maine. I suspect that at least some of those denials were false positives, but I haven't yet found good data on that, wither. It just sounds too much like something Everytown "extrapolated" from some lame-o calculations like they pulled after their half-azzed "sting" operation in Vermont a couple of years ago.
Any help that anyone can give me to poke holes in that claim will be much appreciated.
I've already got him on his claim that "Many other states have already passed a law like this, making background checks truly universal." I don't think eight out of fifty (plus D.C., according to Wikipedia) is "many."
I suspect the writer has pulled the figure from some warm dark location on the lower posterior portion of his/her anatomy, and I'm going to challenge him (or her; it's somebody from Camden) to cite a source. It also sounds a lot like the claim about how NICS has blocked 5,500 gun sales to prohibited persons in Maine. I suspect that at least some of those denials were false positives, but I haven't yet found good data on that, wither. It just sounds too much like something Everytown "extrapolated" from some lame-o calculations like they pulled after their half-azzed "sting" operation in Vermont a couple of years ago.
Any help that anyone can give me to poke holes in that claim will be much appreciated.
I've already got him on his claim that "Many other states have already passed a law like this, making background checks truly universal." I don't think eight out of fifty (plus D.C., according to Wikipedia) is "many."