Making It Up In order to keep pushing New York City Mayor Bloomberg's campaign to bash firearms dealers and manufacturers, the Brady Campaign's Million Mom March Massachusetts chapter made the outrageous claim last week that "illegal gun trafficking is big business for gun manufacturers, distributors and dealers, with an estimated 20 percent of total sales coming from illegally sold handguns." ATF has recognized that the "firearms industry in the United States conducts business in overwhelming compliance with Federal laws and regulations." ATF has also acknowledged that "virtually every crime gun in the United States starts off as a legal firearm" that is sold by a licensed dealer to a lawful buyer whose background has been checked and who has been approved by the federal government to buy the firearm. The notion that federally licensed retail dealers are responsible when those guns later fall into criminal hands months, years and sometimes decades later defies common sense. The fabricated number is "junk" science by so-called experts hired by the Brady Center and others in their junk lawsuits filed against the firearms industry and is derived from creative math misusing federal gun trace data and laughable assumptions (career criminals only use a gun once and throw it away and get a new one for their next crime!). As anyone who understands the relevance of gun trace data knows, tracing a gun's history does not mean that anyone in the chain of commerce has acted wrongly. The firearms industry does not knowingly derive a single cent of income from the sale of illegal firearms. Firearm sales are driven 100 percent by the 40 million Americans who hunt and target shoot, those who own a firearm for self-protection, and by providing firearms and ammunition to law enforcement and our armed forces. And then there is this number from a Delaware County Times story today that "every year, more than a half million people are killed by gun violence." The actual number is 94 percent less than that, with suicides and criminal homicides accounting for the most fatalities, and accidents 730, an all-time low, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. NSSF continues working to set the record straight on these issues and others in Bullet Points and with press releases, media interviews and a letter to Mayor Bloomberg.