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Everytown's anti -armslist campaign

EMNofSeattle

Regular Member
Joined
Aug 7, 2012
Messages
3,670
Location
S. Kitsap, Washington state
so I posted this on facebook in response to a web campaign by Bloombergs everytown for gun safety

See here we go, it's time for outside interest groups to influence WA politics, and lie while doing it,

Great example, Michael Bloomberg (a billionaire from NYC) creates this anti gun group to support initiative 594 (the "background check initiative" that's really an attempt to criminalize youth hunting and recreational shooting), they come up with this study saying the Brady law background checks have prevented 40,000 gun sales in the last ten years to felons (a lie, because the bloombergs group doesn't understand how the system works, but that's for another day) so they claim that online classified ads are a major avenue of criminals buying guns, which is not substantiated by any independent research, they peruse want-to-buy ads on armslist.com and then any ad with identifiable information they search the records to see if the person wanting to buy a gun is not allowed to own one.

so they find 81 WTB ads with identifiable info, out of those, a grand total of 8 MAY be prohibited from owning guns.

http://washington.everytown.org/?so..._medium=_p&utm_campaign=WA.Vis.FB.C14.RHS.A01

now pay close attention to the story they outline, they claim a man in king county is convicted of multiple felonies and then posts a want to buy ad on armslist, but when they lay out the court documents showing his histry (for auto theft, domestic violence, etc) they block his name out of the documents. why? since court docs are public record and it's not illegal to say something that's true about another person?

because they have no clue if the guy posting the ad is the guy with the criminal history, they find some guy with a matching name, but don't know if it really is the same guy. even if he is, his last conviction on the timeline is 22 years ago, hardly a high likliehood for reoffence, also Washington law permits a judge to restore firearms rights after 10 years with no criminal law violations if the offenses were not a class A felony (murder, rape, manslaughter) a restoration of civil rights would be on the civil court docket and not the criminal court docket.

Also, if he is a criminal, posting an ad wanting to buy a browning hi-power would be very unusual, these are now mainly costly collectors guns that are heavy and not suited well for concealed carry, why would a criminal choose that model of gun?

basically, they came up with 8 people who's names are the same as someone who's been convicted in this state at some time, who may or may not be allowed to own guns. that's why they haven't Identified any of these alleged criminals by name, because they could get the pants sued off of them if they misidentified the buyer or didn't bother to check for firearms rights restoration.... don't buy these junk numbers invented by billionaires trying to camoflauge this terrible ballot measure.


check the link embedded for the timeline of one their supposed "felons buying guns" on armslist....

I think This campaign is junk, what do you think of my argument for why?
 

mikeyb

Regular Member
Joined
Feb 19, 2013
Messages
554
Location
Bothell
And of course they talk about 5 websites but only mention armslist by name.
In the Washington Post article, they list Armslist, Northwest Firearms, Outdoors Trader, Washington Gun Trader and Gun Listings

Farago roundly dismisses the article here: http://www.thetruthaboutguns.com/2014/09/robert-farago/omg-felons-buying-guns-internet-omg/

The Post article had this lovely gem:
Federal law prohibits anyone convicted of a felony or domestic violence or anyone deemed severely mentally ill from possessing a firearm. That law prevents only a small number of people from owning a weapon: In 2013, gun dealers in Washington state conducted 561,000 background checks and denied only 3,600 people.

Nice phrasing there; and a moment's pause will make intelligent readers see the truth. The Post wants a lot of people not to own firearms.
 

Tawnos

Regular Member
Joined
Jun 4, 2008
Messages
2,542
Location
Washington
*sigh* I saw this link and the claims about statistics, it makes me sad: http://fortressamerica.gawker.com/heres-where-criminals-go-to-buy-guns-online-1635630820/all

The math at the bottom is for a 95% confidence interval. There are significant issues with the claims made and how they were arrived at. First, a confidence interval doesn't tell you that you couldn't have occurred by chance at all. It says that 95% of random samples of the same population will contain the true mean. Second, they didn't take a random sample! They looked at a decidedly nonrandom sample - out of all sales posts made, they looked at the subset of those which were posts under the "guns wanted" section. They further reduced this set to those wanted ads that included identifying information. That's not how you do sampling statistics! Third, their claim doesn't match what was measured. They claim their measure shows that 1 in 10 gun purchases made online were to ineligible people, yet they measured the number of requests to buy a gun, not completed sales of firearms. Even if they had correctly done the sampling of the wanted ads, the most they could say is that repeated sampling of the same population would include the the actual percentage of ineligible people requesting to buy firearms on that particular buy/sell website 95% of the time.
 
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