40% Of Gun Sales Are Private

So says Patricia Maisch at the Huffington Post in an article insinuating that the NRA is responsible for gun deaths. Does that sound like bullshit to you? Because it does to me. She writes:

The problem is that forty percent of all gun sales are now made through private sellers.

The link provided for this amazing statistic comes from this story at The Roanoke Times. This story by Joanne Kimberlin states:

A survey for the U.S. Department of Justice estimates that private deals make up around 40 percent of all gun sales.

Notice how the estimate given in the Roanoke Times article shows up as fact at the Huffington Post. The Roanoke Times article gives no source for the statistic, but it is full of other whoppers such as 68% of Virginians wishing law-makers to make the "gun-show loophole" a top priority. Yeah right!

So I asked Google if it could find the source for this stat, and out popped this fact sheet from the Illinois Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence. Hmmm... no biased source there, huh? The Roanoke Times article was written in 2008 and the fact sheet was written in 2009, so the fact sheet is not the source for the Times article. But the fact sheet does list its source, Guns in America: National Survey on Private Ownership and Use of Firearms by Philip J. Cook and Jens Ludwig of National Institute of Justice, Office of Justice Programs at the U.S. Department of Justice.

This paper, written 1997, has a section on acquisitions for a survey taken in 1994 (so 17 years out-of-date now). On page 6, it states:

The predominant sources of guns, unsurprisingly, were stores (60 per- cent). Other important sources in- cluded family members and acquaintances. The 3 percent of re- spondents who indicated that they ob- tained guns "through the mail" (which is illegal for all but FFLs) may have misremembered or may have referred to a mail-order purchase arranged through an FFL.

100 - 60 is 40, so that's probably where the 40% statistic comes from. The problem with "forty percent of all gun sales are now made through private sellers" is that it leads one to believe no background check is conducted on the transfer (and "now" seems to make the reader believe it is a recent statistic). But as the paper clearly states in the same paragraph, respondents stated their answers as to how the firearms physically made it to them and not the technicalities of the background check.

The paper also has a chart listing the sources:

• Gun store: 43%
• Pawnshop: 6%
• Other store: 11%
• Gun show or flea market: 4%
• Through the mail: 3%
• Member of the family: 17%
• Friend or acquaintance: 12%
• Other: 4%

The first three figures add up to 60%, hence "the predominant sources of guns, unsurprisingly, were stores (60 percent)". But other sources where background checks probably or must be required are not in the 40%, such as "gun shows" and "through the mail". And note that this is topic is about firearms transfers, not gun sales. Not all transfers are sales.

Additionally, 17% are acquired through family members. If you read Patricia's article, the insinuation is that those 40% of gun sales are done by people attempting to avoid background checks, but a father handing down to his son a family heirloom is a perfectly acceptable private transfer.

So... other than this being an old statistic, and it is from a telephone survey and thus nowhere close to being a fact, and it is about transfers and not sales, and it doesn't include all transfers involving background checks, I guess scaring people with the fact that 40% of all gun sales go under the radar of the FBI is totally accurate.

The Duck over at Maddened Fowl has a post on this with simpler math from 2009 stats:

ATF estimates approx 16.4 million gun sales in 2009, 2 million being used guns, thats about 12% not 40%

That sounds a little more accurate to me, though The Duck is being forgiving. Even used guns sold through FFLs go through a background check, so the number is probably lower than 12%.