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“This whole thing would be really funny, if it weren’t so tragically true. Several states make it so outrageously easy to get and carry guns without background checks that they have become prime destinations for criminals. The American public deserves to know which states are recklessly selling out our safety to do the bidding of the corporate gun lobby. They may be paradise for criminals but the rest of us should all think twice before visiting, moving to, or doing business there.” – Brady Campaign president Dan Gross in Bad news or good? AZ No. 1 to buy, carry, traffic guns [at azcentral.com]

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78 COMMENTS

  1. Is this guy still around? Jeez.. I thought Brady folded.

    Its like haveing house guests over for dinner, saying good night, you go to use the head and when you come back one guy is still sitting on your sofa eating you leftovers.. ‘wtf dude, get out of here. The parties over..’

  2. Which states are he referring to? I haven’t hears of any state that just hands out concealed carry permits without some kind of background check.

    Is this more propaganda to fuel anti-gunners that fail to have their facts straight?

    • There are at least five states where you don’t need a permit to carry. But as far as I know, you still need a NICS background check to buy from an FFL anywhere in the country.

      This dude is drowning in his own delusions.

    • And unless I miss my guess (and it is a guess at this point), those 5 states are not exactly the crime hotspots of the country.

      • And I would further a guess along that same line that says those states have the lowest crime rates and are NOT the states that ‘criminals’ intent on doing crime want to frequent. The gun-control states are the ones that are “… recklessly selling out our safety to do the bidding of the …” Government factions dedicated to disarming citizens.

      • As another TTAG story pointed out recently, some of those states (AK, AZ, TN, & WY) have seen their violent crime rates drop (faster than the national average) since instituting constitutional carry. And the fifth (Vermont) has the lowest violent crime rate in the country.
        So…hmm.

        Also, I’m positive that all five of those states still have laws prohibiting prohibited possessors from possessing firearms, and prohibiting the use of a firearm in a crime, and prohibiting crime…

        • IIRC, Vermont recently rejected the proposal of a “felon in possession” law, so it doesn’t have one. The federal law still applies.

    • Oh you know what states they are referring to. Like Idaho and Alaska. When will those states learn and be more like Illinois and New York aka “heaven on earth”. Wait….’Chiraq’ isn’t in Illinois, right?? 🙂

  3. Really? How is Vermont which has laws similar to Arizona not the same extremely dangerous place you believe Arizona is? Or Wyoming or Alaska? Maybe Arizona’s issues have to do with the sieve we call our border (unfair to sieves I know). Since we’ve chosen not to enforce the border, the drug cartels have free reign in the border states including Arizona. Throw in the profit to be made off the American people inexplicable appetite for drugs and there you go.

    Silly me though. Can’t let facts get in the way of a good fantasy narrative.

    • “How is Vermont which has laws similar to Arizona not the same extremely dangerous place you believe Arizona is? ”

      It’s all those illegal Canadians crossing the border and being polite with their gray-market syrup and weird bacon. They’re a scourge!

    • Dan Gross can’t highlight Vermont for one simple reason: No amount of propaganda, lying, or Astroturf activity can convince America that Vermont is anything but a liberal state that loves its guns …because it knows that guns in the hands of honest farmers, shopkeepers, and small-holders discourage criminal activity.

      It is in the case of Vermont that the gun-grabbing pseudo-progressives must realize (but refuse…) that ‘gun crime’ isn’t about guns. It’s about criminals. The urban ghettos have such an excess of criminals that any guns in the mix cause, well, more crimes involving guns. I suppose the core white-guilt-caucus and the secretly-afraid-of-minorities-caucus of the gun-grabber supreme soviet just can’t accept the obvious, that even liberal states can have both peace and minimal gun laws provided they do not start out with a high percentage of criminal residents.

      • Liberal states, but not progressive ones. Vermont is what *actual* liberalism looks like; your typical gun-free paradise (aka crime-infested pit) is what progressivism looks like.

        Unfortunately, the progressive disease is…progressive. It’s almost impossible to find a liberal that hasn’t been infected.

    • We may mock this video and the people who use it to support their cause but don’t be fooled. These people are not stupid, they know the facts are not on their side so they play the hand they have. The facts don’t matter to a large portion of the population. Emotion and funny sound bites have the effect of getting people’s attention and making them vote a certain way on an issue Most people don’t spend the time to truly understand an issue unless they really care about it. That is why the strategy of using the ballot initiative process worked for I-594 in Washington. The ballot initiative gives the power to a large percentage of people who won’t spend the time to understand the issue at hand.

      Gun owners have the advantage in a legislative battle because the legislature has a higher chance of understanding the real issues and getting to the facts. Of course political ideologies can always get in the way and if you live some states the legislative process won’t help you. More gun owners are passionate about gun rights and are more likely to take action about a gun control or gun rights bill. Therefore they can have a larger effect on the legislative process and who is retained as their representative.

      So don’t make the mistake of discounting the effect of these ridiculous (to us) videos. They are a useful and effective tool for those that use the correct strategy to affect change.

      Ballot initiative attacks like the one that successfully brought I-594 to Washington are in process now in Nevada, Oregon and soon will be hitting Arizona. I think they have a good chance of passing based on the above. Join your state level gun rights organization and do what you can to support them. Talk to and educate your gun owning friends about this threat.

      Some of the state gun rights organizations for the states I mentioned are:

      Nevada – http://nevadansforstategunrights.org/
      Arizona – http://www.azcdl.org/
      Oregon – http://www.oregonfirearms.org/

      • LISTEN TO THIS MAN AND DO WHAT HE SAYS!

        It may sound stupid to us (and it is), but these people know how to hit the right emotional buttons. They’re master manipulators. They’re polarizing the uncommitted majority and priming them to run in the same direction. If you don’t have a unified, effective strategy to counter them, you’re going to get run over by the herd.

        Oregon, Nevada, Arizona — you’ve been warned.

      • Well said.What may seem stupid or utterly ridiculous to someone well informed may seem like sage advice to a moron or a person who acts largely on emotion rather than verifiable information. Don’t underestimate them just because they seem like bumbling idiots. They’re willing to play fast and loose with facts and often to do whatever they feel it takes to further their agenda. Even having the facts on your side in an argument, facing someone who isn’t playing by the same rules as you are can be difficult. I cannot in good conscience justify stooping to their level of dishonesty and almost every pro gun advocate I have ever spoken to feels the same way, we cannot resort to lies and distortions as they do. That means we have to win an argument where the facts may be on our side, but the other side has the luxury of knowing they can twist and distort those facts to fit whatever narrative they choose to come up with. Underestimating them just gives them one more advantage, and while it’s hard not to underestimate them considering all of the ridiculous crap that they spout on a regular basis, it is always risky to underestimate an opponent.

    • As a man living in AZ, I am amazed I missed the dearth of crime supposedly happening in my state. A recent poll found that 1 in 10 arizonans are armed all the time (and an informal poll in my workplace so far has secured about 90%). In my town (Maricopa) there was one murder in the past 5 years, and it was 2 “undocumented immigrants” resolving a dispute in the desert.

      Somehow the numbers don’t seem to add up…

  4. Oh yeah, Arizona, man, it’s a warzone. Think about the sublimation here; their position is that anyone who buys a gun without their permission should be charged with a crime, therefore any state that allows it is enabling criminals. Two transitive properties of BS later, and ALL gun owners in AZ must be criminals because almost none of them would submit to their pre-gun colonoscopy.

  5. Yeah, and I bet sharks are beaching themselves in California because they can taste all that blood flowing in Arizona’s streets.

  6. “Several states make it so outrageously easy to get and carry guns without background checks that the rest of us should all think twice before visiting, moving to, or doing business there.”

    Fixed it and completely agree.

    • Alaska and Arizona have violent crime rates above the national average. The other Constitutional Carry states are well below the national average.

      When you graph out data like this it’s hard to find any correlation. Calculated correlations can go either way, depending on what sets of data you choose. The truth is there are so many other factors affecting violent crime that it’s nearly impossible to quantify the effects of gun laws.

      • Not if you’ve ever used a gun to defend your life. Not if you’ve ever been joyously glad to have hardware on your hip. Then it becomes obvious: guns save lives – just not the lives of criminals.

      • If you look at the underlying crime statistics by ethnicity in Alaska you’ll see crime among the Native Americans (rape, alcohol-assisted violence generally) builds the AK crime numbers. In AZ you’ll see a similar picture involving large differentials of crime rate by ethnicity. It’s the same old statistical game. “Hide the gun (and other) crime differentials highly correlated by particular ethnicity and condition of life (dense urban area versus suburbia/exurbia).

        And the opposite of that “bury the explanation of crime by simply re-sizing the population in which you’ll calculate the rate number…….is the challenge of Vermont (and New Hampshire): In the end there is no avoiding the intellectually honest truth: Gun crime is just crime with a gun. Crime is high where a population has a large percentage of people prone to committing crimes (for money, for sex, or in drunken rage). These places and populations are easy to identify. The Brady and Gross types simply refuse to take on the ethnicity, urban squalor, and alcoholism core issues head on. “Oh no, no, it’s just about guns!” What transparent cowardice. They disgust me. Anything to avoid offending the core urban voting constituencies.

        • I took the stats for 2012 (the most complete year for which stats were available) and took the rate of firearm homicides, and the percentage of population by whites and blacks.

          I plotted those numbers on this graph:

          Homicide rate is in blue, whites are red, blacks are green. Rate of correlation for black:homicide is .79, white:homicide is -.59

          I’m going to control for other factors and run a multiple regression analysis, but I figured I’d pick the low hanging fruit first.

          We don’t have a gun problem in America, we have a young, black male problem in America, and until it is address, we’ll have more dead young, black males.

          The left doesn’t want to solve the problem, so who, really, is the racist?

  8. OMG! Arizona has so many guns available that criminals are flocking there to get some! The Crime Rate in Arizona must be through the roof!

    /sarc

    • Yeah, Arizona must be a terribly dangerous place to live. Luckily, though, there are wonderful places where strict gun laws keep the crime rate very low. Places like Chicago, LA, Washington DC…

      Oh, wait…

  9. Tragic that the most salient point in there gets glossed over with antigun bias.

    They guy is all “Hey our state isn’t that bad! But we should background check all the things anyway!”

  10. These guys just keep trying – they’re like the little choo choo that couldn’t. You almost feel bad for them because they are so desperate that they can only use outright lies at this point.

    • They’ve been using outright lies for quite some time now: “40% of all gun sales are unchecked”; “you can buy guns right off the internet and bypass background checks”; “there have been 75 (100, 200, 100,000) school shootings since Sandy Hook”, etc., etc.

  11. Hm.

    Perhaps some of the crime in border states would go down if we, you know, actually improved border security in a meaningful fashion.

    Crazy, I know.

  12. Yeah, states with very strict gun laws do so much better!

    Come to beautiful NJ and visit the gorgeous metropolitan carry-free utopias known as Newark, Camden, Atlantic City, and Trenton!

  13. States like CA, MD, CT, and NY attract criminals. After all why should they go anywhere where their victims might shoot back at them? Remember NO GUN Zones/States are always safer for the criminals.

    The author has it all twisted up to suit his warped thinking.

    I have completely stopped doing business in States that are anti-gun. They are easy to identify!

  14. which is exactly why I’m not visiting or doing business with: California, New Jersey, Maryland, Connecticut, New York, and Washington DC.

  15. Typical people that think they are funny tryin to be all like relevant and shit. “wow they make jokes about guns they must be so like awesome like cha”

  17. I’m ok with this, it saves us from having to do the dirty work of telling them they are not wanted in Eastern WA/ Idaho.

    • Speaking on behalf of western WA, I’d like to cordially invite them to go to New York.

      Did you notice they didn’t mention WA as a state with universal background checks? Is that because the Brady bunch realizes that I-594 is a complete failure?

  20. Bold faced lie. Chicago is the place I wouldn’t visit. It’s hard as hell for a law abiding citizen to get a gun there, but criminals shoot each other all day long. I’d like to move to Arizona. What a bunch of BS.

  21. It sure was nice of them to make a nice list of states I may one day live in, and under it they even made a “states I will never live in” list.

  22. So how does this guy explain Illinois, particularly Chicago. Oh, yeah, they all come in from Indiana and Michigan, where the crime rate is much lower? How does this work again?

  25. Here in AZ, we don’t have a gun problem; we have a demographic problem. Them damn demographs keep sneaking over the border!

    • Actually, for many of them, the border snuck over their ancestors.

      When I lived in Phoenix, the violent crime problem was mostly caused by citizens, not illegals. Almost all of it was a direct result of the drug war, which does not involve the illegals who sneak over to clean our toilets, mow our lawns, and pick our fruits and vegetables.

  26. Saw this on Cam & Company on Sportsman channel yesterday. Yeah we all know the ttag…nothing to see here-move along…

  29. What states, other than Nevada, which they mentioned, have the legal authority and/or force of arms necessary to exempt themselves from federal laws such as trafficking in firearms without a federal license and other state laws such as possession of banned makes and models?

    Have to admit that I was completely ignorant of this Silver State Loophole that allows anyone to load up a truckload of guns in Nevada, cross state lines, then sell them with impunity anywhere in the country. I think I’ll drop a check in the mail to these guys, so I can get their newsletter and keep up to date on these matters.

    • Wow, comments not disabled–imagine that! Seriously, has anyone ever seen a pro-gun vid with the comments disabled from the get-go?

  32. So AZ is a goto destination for guns… But still maintains less crime than either NY or Cali even with the Fed actively sabotaging the boarders and gutting the CBP? I think you just proved something for us, Mister Gross. What in the world could it be…? Something about being an armed society… If only I could remember…

  33. Know before you go: Maine got a Brady Score of F. Depending on the year it is the safest state in the union, or possible the 2nd or 3rd safest depending on whether VT and NH had an extra murder or two. So, come visit us and improve your chances of not getting murdered while enjoying the freedom to peacefully shoot guns.

    Also of note, assuming you value the truth, in most years the majority of murders in the gun-loving states of Northern New England are committed with tools other than guns. Look it up…

  34. Good to be on the lookout and mock this nonsense, by Brady, but dont get cocky and imagine because POTG know better, that the threat has gone away…we are still at best only 45% of the Anerican public…

    And the anti-gunners have $Bs to spend, 38 with a capital B, in Bloombergs case, and he hasng given, up just gone under the radar…

    http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2014/12/02/bloomberg-plans-gun-control-push-in-states/19785161/

    Bh the time busy people with jobs, a family, gun owners who deer hunt one or two months a year, or go to the range once every couple months, but dont follow politics, or maybe do watch news a week prior o the election, the public airways and newspapers, opinion columns, and paid political announcements havd been runnong, brainwashing the other 60%…

    And tharts a huge money and pr advantage to the politicians in the urban areas that typically concentrate power via long serving liberal state reps.

    With huge money buying outright lies, like the fake public propositions bought onto ballot by enough paid signature collecters, and deliberately misrepresented, by the time busy gun owners wake up, and mobilize, its too late.

    Washington State is the cautionary tale, where a strong gun rights, SAF, was unable to mount an effective defense, despite being headquartered there, and seeing it coming earlier than most.

    Read this puff piece sold into USAToday, by anti-gunners setting up the memes:

    :http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2014/12/02/bloomberg-plans-gun-control-push-in-states/19785161/

    Wake up, Az, you are next.

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