Utah Shooting Sports Council
Protecting Safe and Legal Gun Ownership and Use
P.O. Box 1975
Layton, UT  84041-6975
Copyright 1999-2000 by Utah Shooting Sports Council. All rights reserved.

Firearms FACTS-


What works in reducing crime?   Consider the facts.
    Some people advocate enforcing existing laws which punish criminals.  Some people think there should be a massive gun confiscation program. Others think severe restrictions on legal gun ownership will reduce murders.
    An absolutely objective analysis of homicide data from Richmond, Virginia, Australia, and Canada ahows what actually happens when you try each of these approaches.  (Hint- enforcing the law works, the others do not!)
    Click here to review the results of Denton Bramwell's statistical analysis, or go to http://www.bramwell.org/guncontrol.htm
There are several  other interesting statistical studies related to guns and accuarcy on his main page.

More Data
    For more factual data on the relationship between guns and crime, and the impact off various gun control laws see Dr. John Lott's new book:   More Guns, Less Crime. The anti-gun people hate it, but while they criticize the results, they cannot point out any flaws in his research or methodology.  Their biggest problem is that it totally contradicts a few early studies that carefully took selected statistics out of context to support the conclusions the anti-gun people liked.  Dr. Lott's research started with raw data and analyzed it to come up with results.

Effectiveness of "Brady Background Checks" on Gun Purchases in Utah

    As of the end of 1999, the Utah Bureau of Criminal Identification reported the following results of background checks on prospective gun purchasers using Utah's "Instant Check" system.
Note: Checks prior to December 1998 were on handguns only, since then on all firearms.
 

Year
Total
Denied
Denial %
Reason-
(Criminal 
Record)
Reason-
(Warrant)
Reason-
(Domestic
Violence)
 Reason-
(Protective
Order)
1998
33,795*
  995
2.9%
333
348
159
154
1999
73,745
2,159
2.9%
717 
711
355
270
2000
64,252
2,062
 3.2%
831
550
383
298
2001
65,696
1,830
2.8%
699
496
377
258
2002
* Prior to November 1998 background checks were only reuqired on handguns. Since then, on all firearms.
Source: Utah Department of Public Safety (most recent report-in .pdf format, so slow to load)

    As far as we can determine, NOT A SINGLE person was charged or convicted of the felony offense of a prohibited person attempting to purchase a firearm.  ZERO prosecutions despite having an eyewitness, a false document in the culprit's own handwritiing with their signature and a known resident address verified by two forms of ID.
    Since there is absolutley no interest in prosecuting anyone failing a background check and illegally attempting to buy a gun, why the great interest to subject EVERY gun transfer (father to son, neighbor to friend, etc) to background checks?  The ONLY  reason we see it the repeatedly stated goal of the gun control zealots to end private firearms ownership.  That can oly be achieved by confiscation of private property, and that requires a database of firearms owners.  The "criminal background check" where criminals are not prosecuted only serves to create that database of legal firearms owners.  This is not wild "conspiracy theory" conjecture.  California and New York have already used their records of legal gun owners to later declare certain types of guns to be unacceptable and confiscate them.
 

Where are purchases being made? (December 2001) 
Salt Lake County
30%
Weber County
18%
Utah County
19%
Washington County   7%
Cache County
5%
Uintah County 
5%
Davis County 
3%
All other counties are under 2% each
Source: Utah Department of Public Safety (most recent report-in .pdf format, so slow to load)

Some Questions:

    You might want to ask how many Federal Prosecutions there have been in Utah for violation of the Brady Act which makes it illegal for a prohibited person to ATTEMPT to purchase a firearm-  As far as we can find out there have been NONE!  ZERO! NADA! ZIP!
    How much would other crimes have dropped if all those prohibited persons had been prosecuted and imprisoned for this very easy to prove offense?
    Do you really believe that these prohibited people merely said "Gee, thanks, I didn't know I wasn't allowed to have a gun" and decided not to get one after all?  Or did they steal one somewhere, or get one from a drug dealer or illegal alien smuggler?  Do we need more gun laws, or merely better enforcement of the ones already on the books?

Additional Facts

    There are many "Fact Sheets" available for downloading from the NRA.  These are well researched and accurate sources of information to help refute anti-gunner's claims.  Check the  NRA-ILA Reserach Library


Rev 4/18/02
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