Anti-gun billionaire Michael Bloomberg’s The Trace is cranking up the smear machine to tar-and-feather a firearm retailer, thinking they’ve struck California gold.
Except they didn’t. They’re rehashing discredited reports that attempt to blame the criminal misuse of a gun on the firearm retailer. This time, they’ve got a fawning California Department of Justice report to prop up their dubious claims. It’s not surprising. The head of that state justice department is state Attorney General Rob Bonta, the same man who led the department when it not-so-accidentally “leaked” the personal data of lawful concealed carry permit holders and basically issued a “sorry, my bad” report following an in-house investigation. It’s also the same attorney general who backs every gun control scheme dreamed by the state legislature, including continually defending bans on the most commonly-sold centerfire rifle in America and the standard capacity magazines that go with them.
And AG Bonta knows that elections are around the corner and gun control is on the mind of voters. No one thinks this report is coincidental timing.
Name-and-Shame
This is what NSSF calls the “name-and-shame” game. The Trace, which is the propaganda arm of the radical gun control group Everytown for Gun Safety, plays this nefarious charade of lobbing half-truths to build a narrative that firearm retailers are the source of crime. In this latest report, The Trace cites the Cal DOJ report, adding that the department “defines crime guns as those used in a crime, suspected to have been used in a crime, or illegally possessed.”
Their target is Turner’s Outdoorsman, a firearm retail chain in California. They posted a report with data showing firearm traces of guns recovered at crimes scenes that were first sold at store locations. They include breathless quotes from radical anti-gun California politicians who approvingly support Everytown’s gun control agenda.
Here’s what The Trace purposefully omitted from their report. Every firearm sold at retail requires a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives Form 4473 to be signed and verified by the transferee attesting that they are the true intended recipient of the firearm. If an individual lies on the background check form, that is a felony, punishable by up to 15 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. In fact, California is a universal background check state, meaning every single firearm that trades ownership has to go through this process.
Don’t Lie…That’s Means The Trace, Too
NSSF partnered with the ATF for the Don’t Lie for the Other Guy program, to remind the public that this is a crime. Lie on the form and you risk going to prison.
Note that this is a crime by the individual. While firearm retailers are looking out to prevent illegal “straw” purchases of firearms and are the front line of defense to stopping these crimes, to the point of being the primary source of information to ATF when they suspect one is happening, it’s not a crime committed by the store or their employees.
“Dealers are often the first line of defense to help identify suspicious purchases and flag possible trafficking organizations,” wrote Peter Forcelli, a former ATF executive in an opinion column. “A partnership approach with the firearms industry is a vital component in keeping guns away from the wrong people….”
That’s not what The Trace is preaching, though. They want those in their gun control echo chamber to nod along as they blame highly-regulated firearm retailers for the crimes committed by people who have no relationship to their business. Most people call those people “criminals.” Not at The Trace. They ignore the criminal and smear the store.
Painting Over the Truth
Conveniently, The Trace adds at the end of their report that only California provides this data and that Congress has prohibited ATF from releasing this data since 2004. Conveniently, for them too, they don’t add why ATF doesn’t share the data. Even ATF knows it is data intended for law enforcement use only and misusing this incomplete data doesn’t show the big picture.
The ATF provides a disclaimer about firearm traces with this statement: “Firearms are normally traced to the first retail seller, and sources reported for firearms traced do not necessarily represent the sources or methods by which firearms in general are acquired for use in crime.”
The ATF wrote in the 1998 Crime Gun Trace Analysis Reports, “The appearance of [a licensed dealer] or a first unlicensed purchaser of record in association with a crime gun or in association with multiple crime guns in no way suggests that either the federal firearms licensed dealer or the first purchaser has committed criminal acts. Rather, such information may provide a starting point for further and more detailed investigation.”
In April 2024, the ATF released Volume Three of the National Firearms Commerce and Trafficking Assessment. The report focused specifically on 9,700 ATF firearm trafficking investigations over a five-year period between 2017 and 2021.
The Trace’s report smears Turner’s Outdoorsman by insinuating it is a shady firearm retailer. The truth is firearm retailers, on the whole, are incredibly law-abiding.
The ATF’s own report found just 136 cases of illegal firearm trafficking tied to a federal firearms licensee over the five-year period — just 1.6 percent of all 9,700 cases. With 134,516 FFLs at the end of 2021, that equates to just 0.1 percent of all FFLs being implicated in allegedly illegal firearm trafficking. I am willing to wager you’d find a higher rate of plagiarism in newsrooms across America.
Conversely, illegal straw purchases and private sales accounted for 80 percent of all cases. Stolen firearms represented another 25 percent of cases of illegally trafficked firearms.
Even the ATF acknowledged that the firearm industry is doing its part in self-policing.
“The data analyzed in this report indicates that a shift in the types of trafficking channels used over the course of the last two decades has occurred,” the report states. “Corrupt FFL investigations represented almost 9% of trafficking investigations in the 2000 report, but now represent less than two percent of trafficking investigations.”
Try as they may, The Trace’s best efforts to smear honest businesses can’t cover up their own gun control agenda. Their gun control schemes still show through.
Larry Keane is SVP for Government and Public Affairs, Assistant Secretary and General Counsel of the National Shooting Sports Foundation.