Everytown for Gun Safety, the gun control advocacy group funded by former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, identified 49 licensed gun dealers in Vermont as unlicensed in a report last week. After one of the licensed gun dealers said he was considering suing over the allegation that he was selling firearms online illegally, Everytown issued a correction, reported the Blaze.
Last week’s original report claimed that over 1,000 online gun ads in Vermont were from unlicensed dealers, and thus were sold without first conducting a background check. The pro-gun rights site Bearing Arms first reported that several of firearms in the report were misclassified, and some of the gun photos used by Everytown even included the watermark and brand name of the federally licensed gun dealers. Among those licensed dealers incorrectly included in the report was Crossfire Arms in Mount Holly, Vermont.
Crossfire Arm owner Bobby Richards told Bearing Arms he is in contact with legal counsel “to investigation whether or not Everytown may be the target of a civil suit for falsely asserting that Crossfire Arms violates federal laws that require him to conduct background checks with every gun sold through his business.”
But on Thursday, Everytown acknowledged that it had incorrectly identified 49 licensed gun dealers in Vermont as unlicensed.
The full correction states:
“A previous version of this report incorrectly stated that we identified 1,106 ads posted by unlicensed Vermont sellers offering firearms for sale. We inadvertently included 49 ads posted by licensed dealers in Vermont in this total. This version of the report reflects data based on the updated total of 1,058 gun ads posted by unlicensed sellers, which yields an estimate of 2,926 unlicensed gun sales annually on just three websites in Vermont, including 121 gun sales to felons and domestic abusers.”
Everytown for Gun Safety has come under scrutiny for incorrect or misleading shooting and gun violence statistics in the past.
This summer, Everytown began advertising that 74 schools shooting have occurred since the Sandy Hook Elementary shooting in December 2012. Both FactCheck.org and Politifact called the figure inaccurate.
According to FactCheck.org, Everytown “overstates the number of school shootings by including incidents such as accidental discharges of firearms, suicide attempts and incidents in which no involved party was affiliated with the school.”
“Everytown for Gun Safety is, of course, free to use whatever definition of ‘school shooting’ it desires,” writes FactCheck.org. “But we find the group’s methodology overstates the number of school shootings. By our count, as of June 10, 2014, there had been 34 school shootings — not 74 — since the Sandy Hook shooting on Dec. 14, 2012.”
Similarly, Politifact wrote that Everytown’s figure “could be misleading” and quotes a sociology professor who claims that such a broad definition of school shooting “ceases to be an especially useful measurement.”
Despite Everytown’s statistics, federal measurements show that violent crime is actually trending down.
According to the FBI’s January – June 2014 crime report, the full version of which will be released later this year, “all of the offenses in the violent crime category—murder and non-negligent manslaughter, rape, aggravated assault, and robbery—showed decreases. And the number of property crimes during the same time period decreased 7.5 percent, with all three offenses—burglary, larceny-theft, and motor vehicle theft—showing declines.”
Long-term trends show a decline in violent crime as well. According to the FBI, firearm-related homicides have declined 39% from 1993 to 2011 and the number of homicides at schools has declined over time. “Generally,” writes the FBI in the same 2013 report, “homicides in schools comprised less than 2% of all homicides of youth ages 5 to 18.”
