NCPA BRIEF ANALYSIS: THERE’S NO LOOPHOLE AT GUNSHOWS (AND FEW CRIMINALS)

Some gun control activists claim that 70 percent of the guns used
in crimes come from shows, and Handgun Control, Inc. asserts that
“25-50 percent of the vendors at most gun shows are unlicensed
dealers.” Both these assertions are wrong, as numerous studies
have shown.

o A mid-1980s National Institute of Justice (NIJ) study of
convicted felons in 12 state prisons found that criminals
purchased firearms at gun shows so rarely that those
purchases were not worth reporting as a separate category.

o Criminals did not shift to gun shows after the 1994 Brady
Law mandated background checks for all gun purchases from
licensed dealers; according to an NIJ study released in
December 1997, only 2 percent of criminal guns came from
gun shows.

o A study of youthful offenders in Michigan, presented at a
meeting of the American Society of Criminology, found that
only 3 percent had acquired their last handgun at a gun
show — and many of the purchases were made by “straw
purchasers” — i.e., legal gun buyers illegally acting as
surrogates for criminals, which background checks would
not identify.

o And a 1997 report by the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics
on federal firearms offenders said only 1.7 percent of
crime guns are acquired at gun shows [see the figure
].

In fact, a report issued by the educational arm of Handgun
Control found that only two of 48 major city police chiefs said
that gun show sales were an important problem in their city.
And for the claim that a quarter to half of the vendors at most
gun shows are unlicensed dealers: this is true only if one counts
vendors selling items other than guns — such as books, clothing,
ammunition, knives, holsters and other accessories — as
unlicensed dealers.

Source: H. Sterling Burnett (senior policy analyst), “The Gun
Show ‘Loophole:’ More Gun Control Disguised as Crime Control,”
Brief Analysis No. 349, February 23, 2001, National Center for
Policy Analysis.

For text http://www.ncpa.org/ba/ba349/ba349.html

For more on Gun Control http://www.ncpa.org/pi/crime/crime51.html