bloomberg strikes (ineffectively) again

Today, CNN featured an "article" written by anti-gun politician Mayor Michael Bloomberg, in which he asserts that states with "weak" gun laws are at fault for guns used in crimes. Well, he doesn't go quite that far- he says they are "are the largest contributors to the U.S. market for illegally trafficked guns."

What he fails to mention in the article is that 39% of all firearms presented to the ATF cannot be traced- whether through recordkeeping destruction or failures, or removal of serial numbers, or even foreign sources. The report that Bloomberg and his friends have published (Mayors Against Illegal Guns) does admit this liability; however, it does so in the appendices in the far rear of the document just ahead of the endnotes, and states "[w]hile this undercounts the number of guns, there is no evidence that this systematically distorts the findings of this analysis..."

I've heard of the ability of statisticians to "play" with the data sets they're given in order to couch the results in a more favorable light to one position or another, but do they really accept the loss of almost half of the data set without applying a rather significant margin of error? How can you apply accurate statistics to a situation when you're barely working with a majority of the data?

This isn't the only problem with the report. Due to the single source of the statistics (BATFE), what is presented is a two dimensional view of the numbers. A simple look at a webpage from the Bureau of Justice Statistics, part of the Department of Justice (this page in particular) will show you that 80% of all guns used in crimes are obtained illegally.

And that's the part that these politicians don't want you to know about.

Criminals obtain firearms through illegal sources- criminals lose the right to purchase weapons when they are convicted. These statistics from MAIG unethically target law abiding citizens by not dealing at all with the source of the firearms beyond which state they come from. No mention is made if they were lost, stolen, or in any other way illegally obtained- simply that BATFE traced the original purchase back to a particular state.

Put simply, the overarching goal for Bloomberg and groups like MAIG is to disarm the country completely. They would like to ban firearms completely or prevent all sales of firearms to the point that the existing firearms in the hands of citizens would grow useless with age, netting a reduction in the amount of privately owned firearms. Let us look at some information from another country's experiment with disarming the population.

In Australia, firearms were effectively banned, and citizens were given "grace periods" in which to turn their firearms over to authorities. Since these laws were put into effect...

Accidental gun deaths: doubled.
Assault rates: doubled.

Armed robbery: slight increase.
Firearm homicides: same rate.

There are demonstrably no benefits to disarming a civilized populace, and I can think of no other cause that is as distinctly un-American as gun control.