If there is one thing we constantly (and accurately) accuse elements of the anti-gun groups of, it is hyperbole. Mother Jones, Brady Campaign, Moms Demand Action, Mayors Against Bad Things and Stuff, Giffords Space Adventures and Guns R’ Bad, all of these groups have used exaggeration to the point it becomes a lie in everything but strictest technicality, all for the purpose of making their data scarier. Not accurate, scary.
We constantly come to the desk, the table, and the courtroom bench with the receipts and cited data to make certain our case for the 2nd Amendment is strong, iron clad, air tight. We are the people and the groups claiming to be relying on right and reason combined to make the ongoing case for individual ownership of arms.
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Common hyperbolic nonsense from the ani-gun groups is absurd. Counting “children” as those aged up to 19, when these same groups know the deaths and injuries get magnitudes higher in the teen years, for males especially. Deliberately using children as the leading word, or children and teens to heavily imply we are still dealing with minors alone and not the 18 and 19 year old adults that represent the largest portion of the injured and killed. Including suicides and accidents in “gun violence” statistics when those motivations are nothing like those of robbery, assault, or murder. You know, violent crimes. As long as it was the method of injury the motive doesn’t matter, pad that stat. “School shootings” lists including events unrelated at all to the school itself, especially absent the students or faculty. Other than barely being on or adjacent to the school property geographically the incident had nothing to do with the school. The key word to evoke fear is school. And then my favorite, the obvious obfuscations of mass shooting, which includes just about any situation in which a group people was shot at and more than one person was injured in any manner, with mass killing or a “Mass Attack in Public Space.” The word mass evokes the nightmare scenarios the aforementioned groups want in you to have in mind, it doesn’t matter it is inaccurate to the situation. When they say ‘mass shooting’ at 2:00 a.m. they don’t want you thinking there was a fight that got too hot as the bar was closing between two drunk and belligerently feuding groups, they want you thinking about Mandalay Bay.
Hyperbole is so often the enemy of credibility, it is a narrative tool that must be used with discretion and tact when it is appropriate to include it all. It is often best used beside another exaggeration, sarcasm. You may have caught mine in the opening paragraph. The combined exaggerative methods can have the effect of bringing attention to the absurdities while starkly illuminating the inherent truths. This is why political satire is such a potent communication method.
So it is of great personal irritation to me when I see our side, the pro-facts, pro-reason, pro-details side descend into the same hyperbolic nonsense that Giffords and crew use to try and fear monger a point across.
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ATF’s illegal gun registry now contains 1,414,088,513 records, 92% of which are digitized, the agency confirms to Congress.
Registration data includes the names and addresses of gun owners as well as the make, model, and serial number of their firearms. – GOA Facebook post
Ok, let’s break it down. Because the report to Congress they are citing does not say what they are implying.
The listing does not say 1.4 billion records, it says images/pages. A 4473 with a photo copy of a valid ID document is 8 pages. That is before any additional pages required due to the nature of the transfer, any state mandated additional sheets, or just the method of how ATF scanned the documents. A transaction here in Michigan for example would be, at minimum, 10 pages. One that included two pistols would be 13 pages.
Now those 1.4 billion “records” has suddenly become a dramtically reduced 140 million, if Michigan’s 10 represents a reasonable average pages per record. So there is a record of ~140 million firearms transactions… all from closed FFLs.
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Is that good? No.
Why isn’t it good, because of the “registry?” Honestly, no. That isn’t it.
This isn’t a registry, its a fossil record. That is before we even consider the efficacy of traces in criminal prosecution. I’m not a police officer, nor a prosecutor, but I know a few and I would be curious if any one of them had ever required a trace in order to successfully prosecute a criminal case, even once, during their time in that field. Not had a trace done as part of the general information pertaining to the case involving a firearm, actually had the trace provide a meaningful piece of data to the successful conclusion of said case.
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So be mad the ATF has this? Sure, but be mad for the right reasons. For reasons that stand the test of… well, reason.
As a useable database for ‘tracking’ gun owners and finding guns this thing is idiotic. The error rate is going to be absurd, it would make weathermen look omnipotent by comparison. Anyone who has moved since buying anything or since sold a firearm and the gun shop has since closed, that record is wrong. Erroneous data. Useless. You’d have a far greater success rate just checking social media to see if the person you are interested in recently publicly posted a firearm.
Even with AI able to rapidly organize and table data, the best you could assemble is a historical snapshot of past events with no update method and colossal time gaps. It is a dinosaur fossil of ‘on this date’ a firearm was transferred from an out of business gun store to this person. Even if the next administration declared ‘Full Confiscation, Day 1’ in 2029 this would make for a catastrophically dumb starting point. For the record and comparison, this abominably incomplete and easily made irrelevant through error ridden dataset stretches back to 1968 and the number of years it takes to get to 140 million NICS checks in the modern era… is five. This egregious database is now made obsolete by an order of magnitude every presidential term.
So we shouldn’t be raging against the ATF’s records like this is some nefarious plot to track gun owners. It isn’t. It can’t be. It is comically catastrophically bad at doing that.
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So instead of fear mongering over ‘databases’ of gun owners (By the way, if you own an NFA item you’re in an actual ‘database of gun owners’ and even that one would be woefully inadequate for any manner of near real time query for confiscation) and instead ask why the the ATF is being forced to maintain a mishmashed anthropological record for no useful reason based on the requirements of the Gun Control Act.
That’s why they’re doing it. They’re obligated to maintain the trace data if an FFL closes, per the GCA. So shouting at them that they’re maintaining an illegal registry that they are required to by law is… counterproductive.
Perhaps instead, we should focus our energy on the courts and Congress and get that nonsensical portion of the Gun Control Act (and so many others) amended out or deemed void and unconstitutional.
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We do not require hyperbole to accomplish that. Let’s leave that ‘tactic’ to the other guys.
Read the full article here
