By Tom Reynolds

The USA Today Network article "Crime Guns Flow To NY" was based on a report of the New York attorney general. The article was an ode to greater gun control laws as it tried to convince the reader that ''New York's gun woes are the result of other states' porous laws." 

Andrew Cuomo was quoted, " ... someone can hop into a car, buy a gun just over the border and bring it back to commit a crime." Barack Obama previously said, " ... it is easier for a teenager to buy a Glock than to get his hands on a computer or even a book." 

As usual, the anti-gun rhetoric has little factual basis. 

Under 1968's Gun Control Act, gun-selling businesses must be Federal Firearms Licensees (FFLs) and must obey federal and state restrictions. FFLs cannot sell firearms to prohibited persons (felons, etc.), cannot ship a firearm to a person in another state if doing so violates that state's law, cannot sell a gun to a person known to re::iide in another state, must obtain disclosures from the purchaser on a federal form and must perform a background check on the purchaser. 

Can it be the infamous "gun show loophole" that politicians are blaming? Since an FFL is subject to the same rules when making a sale at a gun show and many gun shows require private sales to follow FFL rules, there is no loophole there. Imposing "waiting period" laws on gun shows would be de-facto bans on gun shows; that, of course, is exactly what the anti-gun lobby wants to achieve as an end run around the Constitution. 

In two studies of more than 200,000 prison inmates who used guns when committing their crimes, Caroline Wolf Harlow, of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, found less than 1 percent of the guns were obtained at gun shows, while almost 80 percent of their guns came from family, friends, illegal and street sources. 

As to the effectiveness of the NY Safe Act, Harlow's study showed about 12 percent of the inmates used long guns, and only some of these guns are banned by the Safe Act. 

That leaves only private sales to blame. The report and article blame Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida as the main culprits because of their weak gun laws. But Pennsylvania and North Carolina, like New York. also mandate that private handgun sales go through the same background check as FFLs. 

Barack Obama wants universal background checks and said existing background checks " ... have kept more than 2 million dangerous people from getting their hands on a gun." There he goes again! Over 96 percent of these rejected people did legally get their hands on a gun because the initial denial was wrong, a false positive, primarily because of a similar name. 

Anti-gun politicians mindlessly pursue the eradication of the Second Amendment and constantly r~mind us that "figures don't lie, but liars can figure."