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As gun control continues to be a hot political issue, the rhetoric is ramping up almost daily. Yesterday, the repackaged “Alliance for Gun Responsibility” (AGR) sent an e-mail declaring that Initiative 594, the so-called “universal background check” measure passed in 2014, had blocked “more than 100 ineligible sales” of firearms out of 5,300-plus private-sale background checks last year. The message gasped, “Those are gun sales that likely would have gone through without our law in place. Those are guns that could have wound up in the wrong hands. Guns that could have been used in murders, burglaries, suicides, or mass shootings.”
But where are the 100-plus prosecutions, one activist wondered in a note to this column. “Show me 100 prosecutions,” the activist wrote, “or it didn’t happen.”
That may be a fair point, considering that gun prosecutions have declined under the Obama administration, according to a Dec. 31 report by the Washington Times. Referring to data from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University, the newspaper reported that convictions in gun cases peaked a decade ago at 9,206 but had dropped to 6,002 by fiscal year 2015.
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