(courtesy washingtonpost.com)

Two mainstream media outlets have examined presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton’s claims about “gun violence” and found them wanting. As in untruthful. You know: lies. While the fisking of Ms. Clinton’s anti-firearms fusillade was quarantined from regular news coverage, the articles hold the former First Lady’s proverbial feet to the fire re: the truthfulness of her statements about guns, “common sense gun safety measures,” etc. OK, this is gonna be fun . . .

politifact.com slams Hillary’s contention that the Firearms Owners Protection Act makes the gun industry ‘wholly protected’ from “all lawsuits.” Her statement . . .

Probably one of the most egregious, wrong, pieces of legislation that ever passed the Congress when it comes to this issue is to protect gun sellers and gun makers from liability. They are the only business in America that is wholly protected from any kind of liability. They can sell a gun to someone they know they shouldn’t, and they won’t be sued. There will be no consequences.

TTAG’s Intelligentsia know that gun sellers are NOT protected from liability claims. If they’re caught knowingly sell a firearm to a prohibited person, all ATF hell will break loose. They’ll be fined and/or out of business. Anyway, politifact.com focuses on her claim that gunmakers are “wholly protected from any kind of liability.”

The law lists several situations that are not protected from liability. It does not protect gun dealers who transfer a gun knowing it would be used for criminal purposes, nor those who knowingly break state or federal law if the violation results in harm. Gun manufacturers can also be sued if the gun, when used properly, causes injury because the product is defective . . .

The act “is not the first federal law to grant a particular industry immunity from tort liability,” said Timothy Lytton, a law professor at Georgia State University, who edited a book on gun industry litigation.

Possibly the most analogous rule — in that it protects a specific group of potential defendants from a specific liability theory — is one that offers some immunity to online service providers, said John Goldberg, a law professor at Harvard University and an expert in tort law, in an email to PolitiFact. Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act blocks victims of online defamation from suing service providers (like Comcast) and content providers (like YouTube) for failing to monitor or remove defamatory posts uploaded by customers . . .

Most of the experts we surveyed also mentioned a vaccine manufacturer liability law passed in the 1980s. Under the law, victims of injuries that they say were caused by defective vaccines are not allowed to sue vaccine manufacturers. This differs from the gun legislation, however, because it established the Vaccine Injury Compensation Program, through which alleged victims can make a claim and receive compensation . . .

There’s also some liability protection in the medical devices and airline industries, noted Walter Olson, senior fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute and expert in tort law. For example,the 1994 General Aviation Revitalization Act said small aircraft manufacturers cannot be sued for accidents involving aircraft more than 18 years old.

And so . . .

We rate Clinton’s claim False.

Next up: the anti-gun Washington Post’s post Clinton’s claim that 40 percent of guns are sold at gun shows and over the Internet. Citation!

It is derived from studies that were based on data collected from a survey in 1994, the same year that the Brady Act requirements for background checks came into effect. In fact, the questions concerned purchases dating as far back as 1991, and the Brady Act went into effect in early 1994 — meaning that some, if not many, of the guns were bought in a pre-Brady environment.

The survey sample was relatively small — just 251 people. (The survey was done by telephone, using a random-digit-dial method, with a response rate of 50 percent.) With this sample size, the 95 percent confidence interval will be plus or minus six percentage points.

The analysis concluded that 35.7 percent of respondents indicated they did not receive the gun from a licensed firearms dealer. Rounding up gets you to 40 percent, although the survey sample is so small it could also be rounded down to 30 percent.

Moreover, when gifts, inheritances and prizes are added in, then the number shrinks to 26.4 percent. (The survey showed that nearly 23.8 percent of the people surveyed obtained their gun either as a gift or inherited it, and about half of them believed a licensed firearms dealer was the source.)

The original report carefully uses terms such as “acquisitions” and “transactions,” which included trades, gifts and the like. This subtlety is lost on many politicians such as Clinton, who referred to “sales.”

The Fact Checker in 2013 asked one of the co-authors of the study, Jens Ludwig of the University of Chicago, to rerun the numbers, just looking at guns purchased in the secondary market. The result, depending on the definition, was 14 percent to 22 percent were purchased without a background check. That’s at least half the percentage cited by Clinton.

And so . . .

By any reasonable measure, Clinton’s claim that 40 percent of guns are sold at gun shows or over the Internet — and thus evade background checks through a loophole — does not stand up to scrutiny.

Only three Pinnochios? Huh. The candidate in question won’t abandon these faux gun control stats. Even so, it’s a cold day in Hell people. As a gun owner living in oven-like Texas, I’m enjoying the breeze!

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54 COMMENTS

  2. Pretty good post, Robert. And I, for one, will not submit to voting for the candidate who will destroy our Constitutional rights more slowly than the next one. I will NOT choose between being drawn and quartered or burned at the stake. That is NOT a choice; what reasoning person would submit to such a choice?

    I will vote for ANY third-party candidate who espouses our basic human rights, and free speech and self-defense lead the pack, as always.

    COME AND GET ME, COPPERS!!!

      • You mean the same Ben Carson who thinks that semi-auto firearms should be banned from cities (unless you’re wearing a government issues costume, of course)? Yeah, I don’t trust him any more than the last black guy who ran for president.

  5. Why would any reasonable Liberal let the facts and truth get in their way??
    They firmly believe tell the lie enough it becomes the truth. Factual numbers dont matter to them.
    The general publics pretty dumb. They believe what she says is gospel.
    Let her lie long enough and it will bite her in the ass eventually.

    • I don’t think “the general public” puts all that much stock in anything a Clinton says. The die-hard Democrats might be blinded, but the average non-political Joe knows that she and her husband are egomaniac liars who will say or do anything to further their personal agenda.

    • Sorry, Jay, but “reasonable Liberal” is a contradiction in terms.

      “Inside every liberal is a tyrant screaming to get out”
      –Fractals ‘R Us, Mar 24, 2014

  6. The only thing that’s unique about the firearms industry is that congress had to pass the Firearms Owners Protection Act to stop activist judges from ruling against firearms manufacturers and dealers that would have been thrown out of court if the defendant was engaged in any other business. Try suing GM if a drunk driver in a Chevy kills your wife. Good luck even finding a lawyer that would even file the suit. Try suing the Chevrolet dealer. Ditto. Try suing Louisville Slugger if your wife is murdered with a baseball bat. No chance. The fact that a law had to be passed to stop the abuses is really kind of absurd.

      • Better start packing the courts with activist conservative judges then. The left has been doing this for a century now.

        • Unfortunately(?) “activist conservative judge” is kind of a contradiction in terms, like “pro-gun Democrat” or the aforementioned “reasonable liberal”. Conservative judges believe in the rule of law, not the rule of black-robed tyrants.

    • Maybe we need to
      Gm for drunk drivers. This cod develops legal presidents that could later apply to fire arms lawsuits should the federal law become wanting. She and lose works for the enviromentist left. We should use it also. Maybe sue and lose in Texas to overturn some federal laws with style over lap?

    • Exactly. The gun industry isn’t uniquely protected; it was heretofore uniquely unprotected.

  7. The article and the mainstream news media should both have focused more on the fact that it is ridiculous to be able to sue someone that makes an object because the purchaser uses that object in an illegal, immoral or harmful manner. If that were to happen we would have chaos in our legal, financial and business systems. A TV manufacturer could be sued for damages if someone purchased a TV set and dropped it out of the window of an apartment and killed someone. Totally insane. But it seems that Liberals love to sue everyone for anything so I suppose some of them are dumb enough to think this might be a good thing.

    • If you check out the political leanings of Trial Lawyers you will find that many (most?) are LibSoc Democrats.

  9. “The analysis concluded that 35.7 percent of respondents indicated they did not receive the gun from a licensed firearms dealer. Rounding up gets you to 40 percent, although the survey sample is so small it could also be rounded down to 30 percent.”

    Ok, my mind is blown. These percentages are also all popular calibers.
    Not only that but the two numbers mentioned in the next paragraph are also calibers……

    • 22 percent of people were not surprised. 9 percent were shocked. 5.56% of people were confused. This was a sample of 762 people, mostly from NATO countries. Their average age was 32.

      • 22, 9, 5.56, 762, 32. I noticed that you picked common calibers for your numbers or that you like guns so much that those numbers are burned in to your subconscious. Ether way I like.

        • 33.8 percent of statisticians want to shoot these so-called analysts at long range for malpractice

  10. I have posted this idea before but with hilary pushing Australian gun confiscation and universal background checks…it is time to suggest it again…

    The best way to stop criminals from going to gun stores and gun shows and stopping them from getting guns from private sales……

    When they are convicted of their felony….put a no guns allowed tattoo on their shoulder.

    What does this do…

    One of the two ways criminals get guns is through straw purchasers….the one technique used is the felon goes into the gun store with the straw buyer and points out the gun he wants….

    The tattoo on the shoulder stops this cold. The gun store, the gun show, could have a policy of asking all customers to show their shoulders before they are allowed in the store………..

    Right now..there is no way to tell if the guy at the counter is a felon without running a background check.

    If you have a straw purchaser at the counter with a felon, you check their shoulders and if the one guy has a tattoo…you can ban both of them from your store….straw purchasing will then have to change……..

    Same with the private sale….if you want to stop felons from getting guns from private sales…this is the best way…any private seller can just check the shoulder of the buyer and tell immediately, without a universal background check, if the buyer can legally buy the gun….

    This tattoo on the shouldeer actually does what the anti gun extremists want….it keeps felons from buying guns in person…..

    And it does not target normal gun owners.

    In fact…you could do away with 95% of background checks…..you walk into a gun store, you ask to buy a gun, they look at your shoulder and if it is clean, you can walk out with the gun right then and there…..no background check is needed….

    If for some reason you already have a shoulder covered in tattoos…then you would have to go through the current background check system…..

    But for most people…no more background checks needed……

    • Radical thoughts…..I LIKE IT! 🙂

      And since there is no law requiring a FFL dealer to sell to an individual, visual evidence that a tattoo has been surgically removed would be grounds to not only ban that individual from the FFL’s store, but for the FFL to report the attempted illegal purchase to the ATF. Let the USDOJ put the felon back in the pen for this crime!

      • If you can be prosecuted and/or sued in civil court for refusing to bake a cake for a gay wedding, I’m pretty sure the same pressure could be applied if an FFL simply decided not to sell to an individual without establishing a good reason why such a sale might be considered illegal.

        • Bad analogy; homosexuals are an official PC pet constituency; gun-buyers are not, to say the least.

    • The Second Amendment says, in its entirety:

      “A well regulated militia being necessary for the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

      It specifically does NOT include any provision for the government it was intended to enjoin from infringing to create, maintain, and enforce a list of persons who in the opinion of the government are not to be allowed to exercise their natural, civil and Constitutionally protected RKBA.

      If you agree to giving this authority to any government entity you have in effect agreed to the repeal of the Second Amendment. If you agree that the government should have the authority to create, maintain and enforce such a list, how will you keep your name off that list?

      • There’s a list of people currently serving sentences in the federal prison system. Are they entitled to exercise their 2A rights in prison?

    • This is disgusting. Why not just a barcode? There’s some good historical precedent for that. The intended purpose of incarceration is rehabilitation. We need to move towards reintegrating these people into our society, not further ostracizing them. When people have paid their debt to society they should be treated as equals. They should not come out of jail as sub-citizens. High rates of recidivism are consequences of the structural failure of (now mostly privatized) prisons to rehabilitate offenders and a return to poor socioeconomic conditions which further drive crime rate. We should work towards penal and social systems that allow us to restore ALL of a person’s rights when they’ve served there time, not create a permanent underclass.

      • Do you realize that violent sociopaths reoffend at amazing rates…and that at each point there are innocent people on the end of their violence. The police commissioner of Chicago said 2 weeks ago that catching criminals with illegal guns is essentially the gateway crime to gun murder. The individual who murdered Hydea Pendleton, the girl from obama’s neighborhood, had been arrested in november on an illegal gun possession charge as a criminal caught with a gun…he was out by January and then went on to murder Pendleton.

        A tattoo on the shoulder conceals it for the purpose of jobs and a normal life…but keeps them from being able to walk into gun stores or shows, and allows private sellers to be protected from a requirement to go through a universal background check.

        Tattoos target actual violent criminals while protecting law abiding gun stores, gun shows and private sellers.

      • Rehabilitation? Are you kidding? That’s a modern re-imagination of the prison system. Incarceration’s historical purpose has been simple segregation of bad guys. Remove them from society so they can not inflict further harm on society. Beyond that, there’s punishment of the offenders by denying them their freedom and subjecting them to the unpleasantness of prison. Deterrence is a valuable feature, too, but rehabilitation? No. That’s not the intent of prison, it’s more of an after the fact feel good measure.

  11. So, they call her on her percentage but still manage to toss the ol Gun Show Loophole lie out in their explanation? As though there are no other reasons for foregoing an FFL transfer than to ‘evade’ a check? It’s not evasion if your transfer simply doesn’t happen to be applicable to the background check rule. This sounds more like Politifact doing their occasional “look at us we’re so unbiased by taking mild exception to some of the boldest lies our side has yet told” thing

  14. Given who will likely be running against her, assuming the FBI doesn’t make a meal of her first, Clinton is going to get chewed up and spit out like a piece of baseball tobacco. It will not be pretty, no minced words.

    And it is going to be the best entertainment I’ve had in a long long time.

  15. Gee, I really find it hard to believe that good ol’ hillary would let any facts get in the way of making her point for pandering to the left wing anti gun crowd. She’s always been so open and honest about making America into her image and beliefs!

  17. No matter how you feel about guns, you should find this most interesting.
    In 1865 a Democrat shot and killed Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States
    In 1881 a left wing radical Democrat shot James Garfield, President of the United States , who later died from the wound.
    In 1963 a radical left wing socialist shot and killed John F. Kennedy, President of the United States .
    In 1975 a left wing radical Democrat fired shots at Gerald Ford, President of the United States .
    In 1983 a registered Democrat shot and wounded Ronald Reagan, President of the United States .
    In 1984 James Hubert, a disgruntled Democrat, shot and killed 22 people in a McDonalds restaurant.
    In 1986 Patrick Sherrill, a disgruntled Democrat, shot and killed 15 people in an Oklahoma post office.
    In 1990 James Pough, a disgruntled Democrat, shot and killed 10 people at a GMAC office.
    In 1991 George Hennard, a disgruntled Democrat, shot and killed 23 people in a Luby’s cafeteria in Killeen , TX.
    In 1995 James Daniel Simpson, a disgruntled Democrat, shot and killed 5 coworkers in a Texas laboratory.
    In 1999 Larry Asbrook, a disgruntled Democrat, shot and killed 8 people at a church service.
    In 2001 a left wing radical Democrat fired shots at the White House in a failed attempt to kill George W. Bush, President of the US .
    In 2003 Douglas Williams, a disgruntled Democrat, shot and killed 7 people at a Lockheed Martin plant.
    In 2007 a registered Democrat named Seung – Hui Cho, shot and killed 32 people in Virginia Tech.
    In 2010 a mentally ill registered Democrat named Jared Lee Loughner, shot Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and killed 6 others.
    In 2011 a registered Democrat named James Holmes, went into a movie theater and shot and killed 12 people.
    In 2012 Andrew Engeldinger, a disgruntled Democrat, shot and killed 7 people in Minneapolis .
    In 2013 a registered Democrat named Adam Lanza, shot and killed 26 people in a school in Newtown , CT.
    As recently as Sept 2013, an angry Democrat shot 12 at a Navy ship yard.
    SInce then there have been MANY more shootings, all done by clearly psychotic demokraps or 0bumas muzlum terrorists.

    Clearly, there is a problem with Democrats and guns.

    Not one NRA member, Tea Party member, or Republican conservative was involved in any of these shootings and murders.

    SOLUTION: It should be illegal for Democrats to own guns.

    Remember: Guns don’t kill people, Democrats kill people!

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