PA Bill Number: HB1472
Title: In primary and election expenses, further providing for reporting by candidate and political committees and other persons and for late contributions ...
Description: In primary and election expenses, further providing for reporting by candidate and political committees and other persons and for late contrib ...
Last Action: Referred to STATE GOVERNMENT
Last Action Date: Apr 22, 2024
CPRC: Clinton and the gun control lobby get it wrong :: 02/05/2016
Hillary Clinton has made gun control a major part of her presidential campaign, at least in New Hampshire.
Over the last month, a quarter of all of her campaign ads in New Hampshire have focused on gun control. In rural areas of Iowa, by contrast, she did not run a single ad related to gun control. In all of Iowa, just six percent of her ads discussed guns.
Dan Gross, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, recently wrote in the Union Leader attacking Bernie Sanders. He recycles Clinton’s rhetoric on the issue.
Gross asserts: “Brady background checks have blocked more than 2.4 million gun sales to prohibited purchasers like convicted violent criminals, domestic abusers and the dangerously mentally ill.” In reality, there were 2.4 million “initial denials,” virtually all of which turned out to be mistaken.
It is one thing to stop a felon from getting a gun, but it is something quite different to stop someone whose name is similar to that of a felon. The late Sen. Ted Kennedy was held up at the airport five times because someone with a similar name was on the no-fly list. Would Mr. Gross really say that a terrorist was prevented from flying on five occasions? Presumably not, but that’s the way that he counts the Brady background checks.
In 2010, the last year that the Department of Justice’s annual report on the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) was released, it showed that 94 percent of “initial denials” were dropped after the first internal fact check. A 2004 review by Congress found that another two percent were dropped when the cases were sent out to BATFE field offices. Many more cases were dropped during the three remaining stages of review.
If a private company’s criminal background checks on employees failed at anything close to the same rate, they’d immediately be sued out of existence. There’s no doubt that for many of the 2.4 million people mistakenly given an initial denial, it was a troublesome inconvenience. But some people really do need quick access to a gun for protection.
John R. Lott Jr. is founder and president of the Crime Prevention Research Center. - See more at: http://www.unionleader.com/Another-View-John-R-Lott-Jr-Clinton-and-the-gun-control-lobby-get-it-wrong#sthash.YXrLIS0M.dpuf
