Crime happens. That’s inescapable. No matter what rules you put in place, there will be some who will break those rules for various reasons.
And guns are a thing, which means some criminals will use guns to commit those crimes. Again, this is inescapable.
But Everytown for Gun Safety in America is still trying to sell the American people on the idea that firearm manufacturers are directly responsible for those crimes.
And NPR, which is still wondering why its federal funding got cut, is helping them out.
Conveniently, this piece doesn’t link to the report itself, just to Everytown’s website, though I found it here, but let’s get a little bit into what NPR had to say about this.
Well, what they wrote about it, because the stupid isn’t all on NPR.
Most crime guns originate from big manufacturers
The Everytown report also looked at which manufacturers’ guns were found at crime scenes. Although the U.S. has more than 20,000 firearm manufacturers, just four companies — Glock, Taurus, Smith & Wesson and Ruger — accounted for more than half of the firearms recovered at crime scenes across the country last year, the report found.
The findings aren’t surprising, given that the four companies are among the nation’s biggest gun manufacturers. Glock, for instance, makes about a quarter of the pistols produced in a given year, according to Everytown, and Glock guns account for nearly a quarter of the recovered crime guns in the group’s dataset.
Nick Suplina, senior vice president of law and policy at Everytown, said manufacturers bear responsibility.
“That there is a correlation between this size of market share and the number of recoveries only just goes to the point that these companies are gaining market share by selling guns that are ending up in crimes and then washing their hands of those crimes,” Suplina said. “The breadcrumbs go right back to the manufacturers.”
Glock, Taurus, Smith & Wesson and Ruger did not reply to NPR’s request for comment.
So Suplina says the proof is in the fact that the most popular guns are the most popular guns.
Gotcha.
The term “crime scene” is problematic because the definition has nothing at all to do with violent crime. Someone who is arrested for tax fraud and has guns in the house will have those guns traced by the ATF and will be reported as being found at a crime scene. The same is true for possession charges, and so on. Literally any gun found at the scene of any crime or investigation will get the label, even if they’re not illegal firearms in any way, shape, or form.
Further, blaming companies for their market share being reflected in the numbers traced is idiotic. If there are more guns in circulation, why wouldn’t you expect to see more of those particular guns showing up in tracing reports? It doesn’t have to have anything to do with the gun companies beyond them making popular products.
After all, if 40% of the market is Glock, then a similar number are likely to be stolen, trafficked, or purchased illegally via straw buys. That’s just how the numbers are going to shake out.
Of course, it’s not like these companies could do anything about a straw buying problem anyway. They’re not made privy to that information. The ATF traces guns, and these companies are aware of those traces, but they don’t generally know why they’re being traced and beyond knowing which distributors they’ve sold the guns to, they’re unaware of what happened beyond their sale.
Not that Everytown understands that.
Here’s a passage from the study that shows an awful lot about the group’s “thinking.”
For decades, gun manufacturers have taken a head-in-the-sand approach to the use of their guns in crimes. They point to wholesalers, gun stores, and other federally licensed dealers as the ones with more knowledge of and responsibility for this violence. And yet, the same manufacturers also facilitate sales, and have enough data and insight to proudly and publicly report how quickly their products sell—and offer awards and sales promotions to their top retailers, regardless of potentially problematic sales tactics.
Sales and gun tracing is completely different. It’s easy to find out who is selling a bunch of guns because the companies have a relationship based on sharing that kind of information.
That’s different when you’re talking about the ATF.
Everytown, however, tries to pretend that’s not the case.
Manufacturers learn about their guns showing up at crime scenes in multiple ways. For example, ATF often contacts manufacturers or searches their records electronically to trace their products. But many manufacturers participate in an ATF program called NTC connect. This program allows manufacturers to make electronic records instantly available to the ATF. Although this allows ATF to quickly complete tracing requests, it also prevents manufacturers from actively participating in the tracing of crime guns they made.
Still, the ATF has published a series of reports identifying the manufacturers of crime guns, and the state of California has also begun sharing crime gun manufacturer data. And for the past three years, this Everytown report has featured crime gun manufacturer data from an ever-growing list of US cities. Despite this progress, it is unclear what systems or plans, if any, manufacturers have in place to understand how their guns contribute to the epidemic of gun violence. But what is increasingly clear is that a small number of manufacturers play a dominant role in driving the supply of crime guns, and they know it.
There’s a world of difference between knowing a gun you made was used in a crime–and the ATF data doesn’t actually show that, but Everytown won’t admit to that–and knowing exactly which dealer sold that gun.
That’s where the onus is going to fall, if it should fall on anyone in the firearm industry. A lot of times, though, straw buyers aren’t as stupid as Everytown wants you to believe, making it hard for anyone to know what’s happening. Yet even if they did, the whole three-year span that Everytown uses to say it’s likely to be a straw buy–the definition that the NPR piece links to the New York attorney general’s office, conveniently enough–is during a period when a whole lot of things can happen, up to and including financial difficulties or a burglary.
See, what this whole “report” is predicated on is the American public’s ignorance about what information gun manufacturers have available to them and what information is withheld. Even if they wanted to know exactly which dealers are doing something shady, they’re not being informed. If they were, some manufacturers might decide that they don’t want to do business with that dealer and direct distributors to stop selling to them.
But even if they didn’t, that doesn’t mean jack. What looks shady isn’t always shady, and if the ATF isn’t coming down on a dealer, why should a manufacturer blink?
Notice how that doesn’t make it into this report? The ATF gets no blame for apparently failing to crack down on these supposedly unscrupulous FFL holders, while Glock, Smith & Wesson, Ruger, Taurus, and others do.
They’re trying to sell America a bill of goods, and a complicit media is helping them without actually asking questions.
Editor’s Note: The mainstream media continues to lie about gun owners and the Second Amendment.
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