Turner’s Outdoorsman is a massive retailer in California, which accounts for roughly 20 percent of all firearms sold in a massive state. While California gun ownership per capita isn’t quite the same as you’d find in many pro-gun states, that’s still a whole lot of guns being sold by one company each and every year. It’s impressive by anyone’s metric.
But when a would-be assassin–I’m not sure I can even really call him the latest since someone tried to shoot up the White House–tried to gun down Trump and most of his administration at the White House Correspondents Dinner earlier this year, the retailer came under some scrutiny. After all, he bought guns from Turner’s Outdoorsman.
Of course, he wasn’t prohibited, so that wasn’t the issue. Instead, Brady started an attack premised on the fact that 26 percent of gun traces in California were for guns sold by Turner’s, but they “only” sold 20 percent of the guns. That’s pretty close to parity, of course, but as Brady continues its assault on the retailer, they’re also catching flak because, well, they deserve it.
“Turner’s Outdoorsman has a proven commitment to regulatory compliance, as evidenced by regular The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) and California DOJ audits that consistently confirm that Turner’s adheres to, and in some cases exceeds, all applicable laws and regulations,” Turner’s Outdoorsman Senior Vice President Bill Ortiz told the Daily Caller News Foundation.
“Firearms trace data provides investigative leads only. Trace data does not indicate wrongdoing by the retailer,” Ortiz continued. “The shorthand term ‘crime gun’ itself lacks a formal definition and often includes firearms that are merely ‘suspected’ of being involved in a crime or were traced for a variety of other reasons. This vagueness highlights the absence of a direct or reliable link between trace data and dealer conduct. For instance, consider a case where a firearm is stolen from a law-abiding customer and later recovered. That firearm would still be labeled a ‘crime gun,’ even though neither the dealer nor the customer engaged in any criminal activity.”
ATF remarked on the limitations of firearms tracing in Volume III of the National Firearms Commerce and Tracing Assessment.
“Firearms selected for tracing are not chosen for purposes of determining which types, makes or models of firearms are used for illicit purposes,” ATF said. “The firearms selected do not constitute a random sample and should not be considered representative of the larger universe of all firearms used by criminals, or any subset of that universe.”
ATF noted in a 2000 report that firearms tracing usually stops at the first retail sale of the firearm.
California Rifle and Pistol Association President C.D. Michel provided additional details on why the tracing data is not a reliable indication of criminal misuse of firearms.
“The tracing data is not a reliable and is not a good indicator of criminal misuse or of a retailer doing anything wrong because every gun used in a crime is not traced and every gun traced is not used in a crime,” Michel told the DCNF.
So while Brady has used these numbers to prompt lawmakers into calling for an investigation, the reality is that they’re blatantly misrepresenting what these traces represent, what the guns actually are, and what any of this means.
Shocking, I know. Anti-gun groups are usually so honest and never misrepresent anything so as to advance their goals.
I mean, other than pretty much everything else they try to spew.
Gun tracing is a useful enough investigative tool, I suppose, but it doesn’t actually mean nearly as much as anti-gunners want it to mean, much less what they want the general public to think about it. It’s never been some miracle process that solves hundreds of crimes. In fact, some have looked and been unable to find a single crime that was solved due to tracing.
On the flip side, when a gun gets traced, it doesn’t always mean what anti-gunners want people to mean. A firearm might get traced as part of an investigation where that gun was never misused and where the lawful owner is never charged. Is that a “crime gun” in any reasonable way? Obviously not, but that has never stopped groups like Brady from trying to represent it as such.
And again, if Turner’s Outdoorsman sells a gun to someone, follows all the procedures outlined by state and federal law–and even the ATF has described the chain as “meticulous” in its recordkeeping, as well as the company going beyond what’s required by law in some cases to keep guns out of unauthorized hands–and that gun gets stolen from the original buyer, guess what? That’s right, the gun is traced to Turner’s, even though they did nothing wrong.
Brady is absolutely disgusting with these kinds of attacks, but then again, what else do we expect from them?
Editor’s Note: The radical Left will stop at nothing to enact their radical gun control agenda and strip us of our Second Amendment rights.
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