Wrong Again: Obama Claims 40% Of Gun Sales Done Without Background Check

During his March 28 comments on “gun violence,” President Obama once again claimed that 40% of gun purchases take place without a background check.

The claim is meant to apply to new gun sales and is patently false, as Breitbart News demonstrated when Obama first used the 40% figure during a speech on Jan. 16.

As Breitbart News explained then, many gun grabbers get the “40%” figure from a 2011 study by NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg, titled: “Point, Click, Fire: An Investigation Into Illegal Online Gun Sales.”

The study claims “40% of guns are sold through private sellers.” It also claims that “the sales–which take place in many venues, including gun shows, and, increasingly, on the internet…fuel the black market for illegal guns.”

This is simply false, and it is as misleading as it is untrue.

For starters, the “40%” figure does not even refer to new guns but guns already in circulation, which are being resold on a secondary basis. This could be a neighbor who sells his hunting rifle to another neighbor, a father who sells his handgun to a daughter who is living by herself, or a mother who sells her late father’s shotgun to a trap shooter or duck hunter.

Yet gun grabbers like Bloomberg and Obama have seized on this figure because they estimate about 40% of all guns in circulation were sold before background checks were in place, thus there is no paper trail on them–i.e., there is no way for the government to find, register, or confiscate them. 

They frame it in a way that makes it sound like 40% of all guns being sold right now–in 2013–are being sold without a background check being performed. And they do so in hopes of fueling more support for universal background checks to be implemented. 

Universal background checks will ban secondary gun sales and eventually allow the government to know where every gun is sitting and where every gun owner lives. That is the end game. 

This is why Senator Mike Lee (R-UT) says, “The proposals the president is calling for Congress to pass would primarily serve to reduce the constitutionally protected rights of law-abiding citizens while having little or no effect on violent crime.”