The Trace:

Just 22 percent of current gun owners who acquired a firearm within the past two years did so without a background check, according to a new national survey by public health researchers at Harvard and Northeastern universities shared in advance with The Trace and The Guardian.

For years, politicians and researchers have estimated that as many as 40 percent of gun sales are conducted without a background check — a statistic based on an extrapolation from a 1994 survey. The new survey, published in the Annals of Internal Medicine, found that the current proportion of gun sales conducted without a background check is about half of the oft-cited figure.

It’s amazing, yes, that the Annals of Internal Medicine can waste time on things like this when there are heart attacks, strokes, internal bleeding problems with anti-coagulants, cancer, and so on.  Good Lord.  There are real medical problems to be solved.  You’d think that aspiring doctors would be at least moderately interesting in practicing medicine rather than being political shills.

Okay, we’ve discussed The Trace before.  They are professional purveyors of fake news, and Google loves them and puts them near the top of their Google news search.  I’m sure you’re as surprised about that as I am.

Note to The Trace.  Your data is worthless.  Those who have purchased a gun without going through a background check – which is perfectly legal in most states – will not tell you they have done so.  I know.  I’m a gun owner, and I know they we think.

The second problem is that criminals have never gone through a background check to purchase weapons, and they never will.  The Trace misses two huge categories of people who constitute a large enough fraction of gun purchases that it casts doubt on the study.  The Trace doesn’t even know how to estimate the size of those two categories because gun owners will never … never … be honest with pollsters.

By the way, not that there would be anything wrong with purchasing guns from an FFL and going through the necessary Form 4473.  So I don’t think it would prove anything one way or the other even if accidentally The Trace is correct.

And I said I was a gun owner above.  I lied.  I lost all of my guns in a boating accident to the bottom of lake Keowee.  I cried a river of tears over that incident.