Clinton Claims Sanders’ Vermont Responsible For NY’s Gun Problem. Good Try.

Desperate to stop the oncoming rush of Bernie Sanders before the New York primary, Hillary Clinton has been claiming that guns used for violence in New York are flowing from Sanders’ home state of Vermont. According to POLITICO, she started hurling the charge on April 4, when she privately told New York Democratic leaders that Vermont was partially culpable for the guns being used in crimes in New York.

The very next day, Clinton’s campaign manager Robby Mook told CNN, “I don’t think Senator Sanders has been sincere here in New York which is facing serious problems with guns being trafficked from Vermont and other states.”

Finally, on Monday, Clinton doubled down at a panel on gun violence, albeit with a clever caveat; she changed the meme to “highest per capita number” of guns, asserting:

[Sanders] frequently says, “We’re a small, rural state, we have no gun laws.” Here’s what I want you to know. Most of the guns that are used in crimes and violence and killings in New York come from out of state. And the state that has the highest per capita number of those guns that end up committing crimes in New York come from Vermont. So this is not, ‘Oh I live in a rural state we don’t have any of these problems.’ This is, you know what, it’s easy to cross borders. Criminals, domestic abusers, traffickers, people who are dangerously ill, they cross borders too. And sometimes they do it to get the guns they use.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) traces s the movement of guns, from the manufacturer to its first retail purchaser. According to ATF, there were 7,686 guns recovered and traced in New York in 2014, of which 4,585 had their source state identified.

As The Washington Post notes, “In 2013 and 2014, the states where the most number of out-of-state crime guns originated were Virginia, Pennsylvania, Florida and Georgia. The state with the most number of guns per 100,000 people was, indeed, Vermont. But 1 percent of crime guns whose sources were identified in 2014 originated from Vermont: 55 of 4,585.”

The top 15 source states for firearms found in New York in 2014 and 2013:

Although Vermont is indeed, a sparsely populated state, the Post notes, “Using the number of people in the source state is a problematic denominator, because gun trafficking deals with the behavior of gun dealers and the type and enforcement of state laws, according to criminal justice researchers we interviewed. Crime guns tend to originate from a small number of bad actors, and trace data are used to focus enforcement efforts to find those bad actors in a certain state. ATF calculates gun trafficking data by raw figures, not per capita.’

John Roman, senior fellow in the Justice Policy Center at the Urban Institute, put the matter to rest, telling the Post, “It doesn’t matter how many people live there. The issue is, how many gun dealers are there that are contributing to violence in New York. I literally have never heard of Vermont coming up in this conversation. Literally never. These conversations are always about law enforcement in places like New York being worried about Southern states with easy access to weaponry.”

The Post concluded, “The number of crime guns in New York from Vermont is so small that it could even be attributed to one or two bad actors. Using the per capita measure of trafficked guns originating from Vermont is as pointless as counting guns trafficked per 100,000 head of cattle.”

H/T The Washington Post