My go-to gun store is a little pawn shop on one of the main roads here in town, smack in the heart of the retail district of the city. Because of their location, they're probably the first stop for a lot of people looking to buy things like firearms.
As a result, they have a lot of the guns they sell turn up in the hands of criminals years later.
It's awful that it happens, but is it evidence of wrongdoing? Some would have us believe so.
Selling firearms to Americans exercising their Second Amendment rights is not evidence of wrongdoing. Neither is discovering, years later, that police recovered a gun a retailer once handled.
That distinction is at the center of “The Limits of Crime-Gun Trace Data,” a rebuttal published by the University of Wyoming’s Firearms Research Center (FRC). Attorneys Jason A. Davis, C.D. Michel, and Anna M. Barvir challenge The Trace’s effort to use California firearm-recovery statistics to cast suspicion on Turner’s Outdoorsman.
The authors explain how narrow statistics, expansive definitions, and inconsistent comparisons produce a much more accusatory story than the evidence supports. For gun owners, the stakes extend beyond one retailer: records of lawful commerce are being used to put the businesses serving them under suspicion.
A Sweeping Accusation Built on a Restricted Sample
The Trace’s May coverage claims Turner’s accounts for roughly a fifth of California’s firearm sales and a quarter of its “crime guns.”
I'm going to jump in here because we've covered this fiasco already, and the long and the short of it is that the numbers are scary close to one another, which suggests no wrongdoing at all. Turner's is a massive chain in the most populous state in the country, and has a staff that sees a lot of people.
Those facts alone make it attractive to would-be straw buyers, many of whom aren't exactly telegraphing their intentions.
And as Ammoland notes, they're really not responsible for nearly what's being claimed, as the study this comes from has some methodological issues.
Still, for the sake of argument, there are two kinds of straw buyers. The first are the obvious ones. These are the ones who go into a store with someone and all but tattoo "straw buyer" on their foreheads. They usually don't get anywhere.
Then there are those who come in and are a lot sneakier about it. They act exactly like they're the gun buyer. Maybe they're buying it for someone else, who scoped out what was what days earlier, or maybe they're buying the gun to turn around and sell it to someone else who isn't really part of the deal yet. Maybe it's something else.
My point, though, is that not all straw buyers are obvious about anything.
Then we need to consider something else, and that's how they determine these stores are somehow at fault, and this is the real problem with this tracing data being available: They consider that any gun recovered within three years was likely a straw buy.
Seriously, that's their criteria.
Sure, some of those probably are, but many others are thefts or, as in non-universal background check states, good-faith face-to-face transfers that somehow weren't what they seemed after the fact.
Why ding a gun store for what happens years after a gun left their store?
The truth is that I believe the claims being made by some of these people should be legally actionable, especially when they outright make claims about stores like Turner's that run contrary to the established facts, namely that Turner's is meticulous in its compliance with ATF regulations. This runs awfully close to defamation, in my book, at least.
But alas, all we can do is stop giving them information they only want so they can demonize gun stores that have done nothing wrong.
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their extreme gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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