As I reported back in January, Initiative 594 is really a stupid bill. Not only does it literally …

As I reported back in January, Initiative 594 is really a stupid bill. Not only does it literally do nothing to keep anyone any safer -- there is no evidence showing any correlation between universal background checks for gun transfers and reduced gun violence -- but it also significantly impedes on normal law-abiding gun activity, such as letting other responsible adults borrow, or even hold, your guns.

Literally and explicitly, the initiative makes it illegal for you to hand your gun to another person under most circumstances. There are exceptions, such as for educating a minor, or in order to save the life of the person to whom the gun is transferred (but not to save anyone else: just themselves). If your mother is in your home and she is thinking of buying a handgun like yours, though, you can't hand your unloaded gun to her so she can examine it. Because, you know, she might hold up a liquor store with it or go shoot up a local elementary school.

So even if you want universal background checks for gun sales, I-594 is just a stupid implementation of it. There's no defending it on these points, and as such, even anti-gun folks should oppose it. It is abandoning all reason to pretend it is reasonable to require a background check virtually every time a gun literally moves from my hands to another adult's.

But even from the gun sales perspective, there's no serious reasons to think it will result in any positive benefits to anyone. People who think otherwise are generally being lied to: for example, "Everytown For Gun Safety" claims that out of 1 in 10 people seeking to buy guns through "online unlicensed sales" in Washington, is someone who could not pass a background check.

How could they know this? Well, obviously, they can't, and they don't. They looked at 1,164 "want to buy" gun ads online, identified 81 (6.96%) of the individuals who placed the ads, and found 8 (0.69% of 1,164, 9.88% of 81) people who would have failed a background check. That's their data.

These anti-gun folks made two major false assumptions, and offered a major false implication.

First, that the 8 people either represents or underrepresents the actual population of people who want to buy guns through these "online unlicensed sales". They make some reasonable arguments for why it might underrepresent the population, but they cannot demonstrate it at all, so it cannot be counted as evidence. Worse, the data is not even representative of the population: the 8 positive matches from an 81-member sample has a confidence interval of +/-10.5 points at a 95% confidence level, which means we can be 95% certain the actual percentage is between -0.62% and 20.38%. So it's not "1 in 10," it's actually somewhere between "-1 in 10" and "3 in 10" ... which is just nonsense.

Second, they falsely assume that these "online unlicensed sales" are legal, and would thus be impacted by a new law requiring background checks. If the seller is a criminal (for example, selling a stolen gun), he will not care about this new law. He'll sell it anyway.

Third, they falsely imply that the sample of people who want to buy represents the people who actually buy. This pretty well goes without saying -- which is why in their printed matter, they emphasize that these people are only seeking guns, not actually buying them -- but it renders their actual argument useless. If 1 in 10 who want to buy legally may not, but they account for only 1 in 500 of purchasers, doesn't that change the argument for universal background checks significantly, and maybe even nullify it?

And further, even if the new law would actually have the effect of stopping these specific sales to illegal buyers, those buyers would not necessarily be prevented from buying a gun, simply because there's so many ways to get a gun illegally that this law won't impact.

Arguably, this is all the wrong data to be looking at anyway. Yes, we want to keep people who cannot legally own guns from owning them. But it seems to me that the more important information is about where guns come from when they are used in crimes, and the only data I've ever seen shows that only a tiny portion of these come from legal sales to illegal buyers, most likely because such sales are likely to be documented and traceable and will have an eyewitness (the seller) who can identify the purchaser, so someone with criminal intent is unlikely to go this route, again, because there's so many ways to get a gun illegally (and such illegal transfers account for a much, much larger portion of the guns used in crimes).

I do not, and would not, argue that we should not have a law to stop illegal activity just because that law won't work very well. I argue, rather, that if a law will not significantly impact the illegal activity it says it is designed for, but that law does significantly impact the valid exercise of constitutional rights, then that law is obviously a bad law. And that's what we have in I-594.