Reporters are generally educated at American colleges and universities. While education once meant people were taught how to think critically, those days are clearly over. Now, "education" means regurgitating university-approved "facts" and saying them like you mean them.
Because of that, they repeat stupidity like it's something else.
For example, it seems Everytown is telling the media where trafficked guns come from, and not a single one of those morons can look at these claims and do anything but parrot them.
Licensed gun dealers are a major source of firearms that end up illegally trafficked, according to a new analysis using federal data by the research arm of Everytown for Gun Safety, which advocates for stricter gun laws.
Gun trafficking involves diverting guns from legal commerce into the illegal market, often through straw purchases, unlicensed dealing or other methods that bypass background checks and federal recordkeeping requirements.
A straw purchase is when someone who can legally buy a gun does so on behalf of another person who cannot or does not want their name associated with the purchase.
Using trace data from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, Everytown for Gun Safety found that 96% of guns recovered at crime scenes and traced between 2017 and 2023 were originally purchased from a licensed dealer. Everytown estimates more than 1.27 million guns will have been trafficked nationwide by 2026.
Everytown then goes on to try and put the blame on those licensed gun dealers.
First, let's understand what ATF tracing data is going to report. See, when a gun is traced, the ATF runs from the manufacturer to the distributor, and they get the name of the dealer who sold the firearm to someone, whose name is handed over to the ATF. Now, sometimes, that person is a straw buyer, but many other times, that person is someone who was later the victim of a burglary.
But according to Everytown, via the link in the quoted section, here's what is happening.
- The vast majority of guns that end up trafficked begin as part of the inventory of a licensed gun dealer.4 The top two trafficking methods are straw purchasing and unlicensed dealing, which both involve illegal sales from a licensed gun dealer and account for more than half of all trafficked firearms.5 When dealers fail to recognize the telltale signs of suspicious sales that indicate trafficking, they become suppliers of trafficked guns—prioritizing profit over safety.
Now, let's consider that the guns are on their inventory books. They're not just selling them out of the back room. Some have done some shady stuff over the years, sure, but most licensed gun dealers are doing no such thing. Everytown is accusing licensed dealers of this because it helps their position, but it doesn't really have much to do with reality.
We know, for example, that nearly half of all criminals buy their guns on the black market, which does not inherently mean unscrupulous dealers selling their inventory illegally. What that actually means is that criminals either steal them directly--a small percentage, admittedly--or they buy them from someone else who stole them.
But every single one of those guns can and will be traced to a licensed gun dealer.
The small handful that aren't are stolen either in transit or from the distributor somehow. That's literally all that gun tracing finds, which is why all the hysteria about so-called ghost guns is moronic.
As for the straw purchases, it's funny how anti-gunners seem to think that every one of these is so easily detectable, but they rarely look at the purchases of people who are buying lawfully for comparison. They think they know, but considering the behavior they find troubling much of the time, they don't.
Yet reporters just parrot this because they don't know how to look at things objectively and critically. They repeat what they're told because that's all they've been trained to do. They're not taught to ask questions and seek the alternative point of view. They're just tools of the machine.
Well, they're tools, anyway.
