When President Obama announced his gun-violence task force results back in January, he
declared:
“The law already requires licensed gun dealers to run background checks,
and over the last 14 years that’s kept 1.5 million of the wrong people
from getting their hands on a gun. But it’s hard to enforce that law when as many as 40 percent of all gun purchases are conducted without a background check.” [Emph. added]
Does this mean that we should close the "gun show loophole"? The most recent numbers on this come from a 1997 survey (
full text available here) conducted by the US Bureau of Just Statistics. Here is the actual data (from p.10) on where criminals got their guns:
Gun shows account for a statistically insignificant 1.7% of guns possessed by criminals. That is because criminals get their guns overwhelmingly from the sources one would expect: friends, family, drug dealers, the black market, and theft.
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