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Earlier this month, the Department of Justice published updated numbers on how guns used and found at the scenes of state and federal crimes were obtained, and the American people will be shocked to know that criminals still don’t like to follow gun laws.
The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) survey was conducted in 2016 and reported that an estimated 287,400 prisoners possessed a gun in 2016 while they committed the crimes for which they were imprisoned.
Overall, it turns out that the vast majority of them didn’t obtain their firearms from a retail source, and fewer than one percent of them got them at a gun show. And a lot of them got their weapons illegally. Who could have guessed?
Here’s what the DOJ found:
- Among the prisoners who had a firearm when they committed their crimes, 90 percent did not get their gun from a retail source, and less than one percent got theirs at a gun show.
- Only seven percent of state and eight percent of federal prisoners “had purchased it under their own name from a licensed firearm dealer at a retail source.”
- About one fifth of those who possessed a gun during their offenses bought it with the intention of committing the crime.
- A plurality of prisoners, 43.2 percent, got their guns off of the black market, off the street, or through theft.; 25.3 percent got the gun from a family member or friend, either through purchase, rental, trade, or as a gift; 6.9 percent said they found the gun at the scene of the crime, and 4.6 said the gun was brought by someone else.
These numbers will come as little surprise to Second Amendment advocates who are well aware that gun control laws only keep guns out of the hands of those willing to abide by them. Illegal transactions, black market purchases, and theft all remain as pipelines to get hardware into the hands of criminals.
But anti-gun crusaders keep pushing draconian gun laws (see: Chicago), enhanced background check regulations, and banning specific types of firearms based on mostly cosmetic criteria.
But then again, when have pesky things like facts, data, and reason ever really mattered when it comes to gun control legislation?
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