More anti-gun dribble from the anti-gun NYtimes
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June 17, 2003
[url=http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/17/national/17GUNS.html]50% of Dealers Willing to Sell Handguns Illegally, Study Says[/url]
By ERIC LICHTBLAU


ASHINGTON, June 16 — A study released today by researchers at U.C.L.A. says half of firearms dealers questioned in an undercover survey were willing to allow buyers to make "straw purchases" that could violate federal law.

The researchers said the report, which they described as the first academic study of its kind, demonstrated the willingness of many dealers "to ignore or sidestep" laws. The findings were published today in Injury Prevention, a peer-reviewed academic journal.

Officials with the gun industry and the government, who have joined in an effort to make dealers aware of their legal responsibilities, said they did not believe that straw purchases were common.

"Our message is if you have any doubt about whether it's a legitimate sale or not, you should not make the sale," said Larry Keane, vice president of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, an organization in Newtown, Conn., that represents dealers and others in the industry.

Researchers at the University of California at Los Angeles, posing as potential buyers, called 120 dealers in 20 cities, giving different scenes for wanting to buy guns. The researchers found that when they said they wanted to buy guns for a boyfriend or girlfriend who "needs it," 52.5 percent of dealers were willing to make the sales.

The researchers said that based on their interviews with law enforcement officials, such sales would amount to illegal straw purchases and would skirt the law intended to ensure that people falling in prohibited categories like felons or people with histories of mental illness not obtain guns.

Industry officials disagreed, saying the questioning was so ambiguous that it could fall under an exemption that allows a buyer to buy a gun as a gift for someone who is not banned from owning one.

The researchers also made 20 follow-up calls to randomly chosen dealers and said they needed to buy guns for girlfriends or boyfriends because they were not "allowed to."

In 16 of those cases, or 80 percent, the dealers responded with unequivocal "nos," indicating that the purchases would clearly be illegal. In the remaining four cases, the dealers agreed to sell the guns, even though they indicated that they knew that would be illegal, the researchers said.

"If you have 20 percent of gun dealers in these urban areas willing to make sales that are clearly illegal, we've got a problem," Susan Sorenson, a professor at the U.C.L.A. School of Public Health and the co-author of the study, said in an interview.

Professor Sorenson said the study found widespread "ignorance of the law."

Officials at two gun control groups, the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence and the Violence Policy Center, said the findings pointed up the need for tougher regulation of dealers at a time when some members of Congress are pushing to shield the gun industry from liability suits.

Officials at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives said they could not comment on the study because they had not had reviewed it in detail. But they said information from 1998 showed that out of nearly 700 investigations into straw purchases, 36 involved licensed dealers.

Mr. Keane at the sports shooting foundation pointed to a federal study in 2000 that showed that 8.3 percent of state and federal inmates in custody on gun charges said they had obtained their weapons from retail outlets. More than 39 percent reported obtaining their weapons from street transactions. The study showed, however, that corrupt dealers accounted for a large proportion of illegal weapons.

Mr. Keane said that although the industry did not regard straw purchases as a major problem, it had worked aggressively with federal officials on the problem. Under the "don't lie for the other guy" program, the industry has worked with officials to distribute 23,000 kits to dealers since 2000 about the law and the consequences of violating it.

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company

Reminds me of Sarah Brady buying a gun for her son.

Even the "not allowed to" one is kinda ambiguous - why aren't they allowed to? Are they a felon or drug addict? Or are they, say, living in a apartment or dormitory that doesn't allow guns?

And trust a paper like the New York Times to use a sensational, biased headline like "50% of Dealers Willing to Sell Handguns Illegally" rather then something more neutral like "Study researches whether gun dealers would make illegal sales"

    Sound like:  [bs2]

   

Um, professor, it's simple math - not 20% of dealers - it's 20% of the 52% or 10.4% - if I'm understanding this correctly, I'm assuming the "follow-up" calls were to the dealers that said it was okay the first time around - otherwise there's no need for a follow-up.

Not that it matters - 10% looks bad, too IMO.
CR

Edited to add color.

Probably a load of BS.

In any case, the FBI should get a warrant to get all their info that they collected in the study and shut down the places willing to sell to undercover agents that would go confirm this shit.

Indicating it over the phone and actually doing it are two totally different things...

OK, now I'll fess up and admit that I got a C in statistics by sheer luck, but I KNOW that using a sample size of 20 is NOT A GOOD REPRESENTATON in this case.  WTF?  I bet if I call one (and only one) of the local gunshops, I can have a equally valid "survey" that shows that 0% are willing to break the law.

I'll retreat back into my own little world now, since the real world has waaaay too many morons.

If you want to give this bitch a piece of your mind, her email is [email protected]

Pure BS. THis weekend at our table (worked a friends tables for him), we had a person buy two handguns. He had three friends with him. NOt once was there a referance to the others getting these guns, or not once did they ask about them ask to hold them or anything of that nature. After it was all said and done, he legally purchased them, with the Feds approval(NCIC). Now, what he does after the sale is his business, not ours. It is not the job of the FFL holder to try and "guess" what a persons intent is. Nor is it the FFL holders job to try and police who buys what. This BS pisses me off.

BS,
CH

BS, let's see some prosecutions for Brady violators before we pretend we have found an imaginary one.

We should also be aware that the NY Times weights their polls to produce a liberal bias.

Root Article

Dick Morris: CBS/NY Times "weight" their polls to favor Democrats
posted 06/02, by mmglist (viewed 124 times) | Scope : National
Popularity : 6 (7 encourage, 1 discourage)
Relevance : 11

After pollsters collect raw survey results from around the country, they compare certain characteristics of the people polled to those of the population at large, as measured by the Census. If the percentage of people with any particular characteristic—say, those who live in rural areas—is lower than the national percentage, then rural people will typically be weighted "up," i.e., their answers to the survey must be attributed to a larger percentage. Alternatively, if rural people are overrepresented in the raw survey results, as compared to the national percentage, they must be weighted "down."
Morris writes, is that
each one ... weighted up the number of Democrats and weighted down the number of Republicans—every single time!
If the Times were using weighting to adjust for sampling error, surely the weightings would sometimes increase the number of Democrats and would sometimes decrease it. But what the Times has done—increasing the ratio of Democrats to Republicans each time—isn't weighting the sample. It's slanting it.
"They will, undoubtedly, come back and say that they don't weight for party—they just weight for demographics. They will attribute the change in the partisan mix of their sample to the unintended by-product of a weighting to get proper demographics. ... This explanation would hold water if even once in a while these unintended consequences made their poll sample more Republican. But since 9/11, their weighting has always made the sample more Democratic. Every time."
The main reason CBS/New York Times poll weighting has tended to favor Democrats apparently is that these polls are conducted by telephone, a method that inevitably undercounts lower-income people, who are highly mobile, less likely to have phones, and tend to be heavily Democratic. Of course, they haven't spoken to them and ASSUME that they are Democrats.