As Florida's annual Legislative Session continues in Tallahassee, some of the hot-button issues have come back into the spotlight. One such issue is gun sales and background checks in the state of Florida.
At a recent press conference in Tallahassee, Equality Florida's Public Policy Director Hannah Willard noted that a relatively large percentage of gun sales happen without standard background checks. Here's what Willard said:
"Experts estimate that 40 percent of gun sales occur in no-questions-asked transactions that often take place at gun shows or on the internet."
Our partners at PolitiFact Florida decided to look at Willard's statement to see if it was true. PolitiFact reporter Allison Graves says that Willard's statement rates FALSE on the Truth-O-Meter. Graves says that Willard is using outdated information to support her claim.
"After we started our research, we found that Willard was actually citing a statistic from a 1994 survey," Graves said. "Now, that survey did find that 40 percent of people had received guns in some kind of no-questions-asked transaction, but those statistics were including circumstances like guns being given as gifts or guns being given as an inheritance. Including that data skews the numbers, so that adds to the cloudiness of the claim."
Graves notes that newer data exists that supercedes the 1994 survey.
"We also found out that a survey done in January of this year was recently released, and after polling about 1,500 adult gun-owning people, the data showed that about 22 percent of respondents acquired their gun without a background check," Graves said.
Because of the use of outdated information, as well as the inclusion of responses that skews the numbers, PolitiFact rates Hannah Willard's statement FALSE on the Truth-O-Meter.
SOURCES: No-questions-asked gun transactions
- PolitiFact ruling
- Hannah Willard, remarks at a press conference at the Florida state capitol in Tallahassee, March 16, 2017
- Bill page for SB 1334
- Bill page for HB 1113
- Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence, "Background Checks" web page, accessed March 16, 2017
- Matthew Miller, Lisa Hepburn, and Deborah Azrael, "Firearm Acquisition Without Background Checks: Results of a National Survey" (in Annals of Internal Medicine), January 2017
- Philip J. Cook, "At Last, a Good Estimate of the Magnitude of the Private-Sale Loophole for Firearms," published in Annals of Internal Medicine, Jan. 3, 2017
- Orlando Sentinel, "Democrats to push gun background check bill," Jan. 10, 2017
- PolitiFact Virginia, "McAuliffe says 40 percent of U.S. gun sales escape background checks," Nov. 2, 2015
- Email interview with Philip J. Cook, public policy professor at Duke University’s Sanford School of Public Policy, March 16, 2017
- Email interview with Hannah Willard, public policy director for Equality Florida, March 16, 2017