Friday, April 19, 2013

Who is really lying in the gun debate?


After failing to get his gun control bill passed by the Senate Wednesday, President Obama lashed out at his usual favorite targets, "the gun lobby" and Republicans.

He claimed "the gun lobby and its allies willfully lied about the bill." He scolded "senators [who] could not offer any good reason" to oppose the legislation. And sharing the stage with some of the heartbroken families from Newtown, Connecticut, he attacked Republicans as being unwilling to "protect the lives of all our children."

But who is really lying in the gun debate? Mr. Obama's case in favor of background checks rests on two false claims that he keeps repeating: “as many as 40 percent of all gun purchases take place without a background check” and that "background checks have kept more than 2 million dangerous people from buying a gun.”

Yet his claims only make sense if you ignore that the vast majority of these "purchases" are within family gifts and inheritances and that these "dangerous" people are actually law-abiding citizens who were accidentally stopped from buying a gun simply because they have a name that is similar to a criminal's.

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