Cam Edwards from our sister site Bearing Arms absolutely nuked CNN over this comically inaccurate article on gun sales in Illinois by Chauncey Alocrn:
No state has seen more gun sales this year than Illinois. Feds there have completed nearly 4.3 million gun background checks since January, including more than 955,000 submitted last month. That's more background checks than the next 5 states combined.
— Chauncey L. Alcorn (@CLamontLives) May 4, 2021
Since January, federal authorities have completed more background checks in one state than the next five states combined. https://t.co/OFEQBRQ3r4
— CNN Business (@CNNBusiness) May 4, 2021
First up, the article inflated the number of gun sales in the state by 850,000 give or take:
Man, @CNN really screwed up a story on gun sales. They wrote an entire article based around the idea that the state of Illinois had more than 900k gun sales last month, when it was really closer to 44k. 1/ https://t.co/kbRgXQ9tcl
— Cam Edwards (@CamEdwards) May 4, 2021
This would mean half of all guns sales occurred in Illinois, which SHOULD have been a red flag:
According to this CNN story, more than HALF of all gun sales in the U.S. last month took place in IL, and they even claim they know why… but they're wrong about that too. 2/https://t.co/4cDPu1bM5b
— Cam Edwards (@CamEdwards) May 4, 2021
But instead of seeing that red flag and saying, “Hey, something is up!” they ran with it and invented a way for it to be correct:
CNN attributes the @NSSF as saying "Illinois firearms purchases have been greatly inflated so far this year because many state residents who were looking to purchase guns at the beginning of the pandemic have only recently been able to do so" 3/
— Cam Edwards (@CamEdwards) May 4, 2021
Cam explains what went wrong with that:
I'm guessing the @CNN reporter took that quote a little out of context, since the NSSF knows that the actual figure for NICS checks on gun transfers in IL was about 44k last month, not 955k.
There *is* a real issue with FOID card delays, but that's an ongoing issue. 4/
— Cam Edwards (@CamEdwards) May 4, 2021
The demand is still pent up, in other words. It certainly didn't lead to 955k gun sales in the state last year. .
What happened is that CNN used the raw NICS numbers as a proxy for gun sales. You can't do that generally, but you *really* can't do that for IL. 5/
— Cam Edwards (@CamEdwards) May 4, 2021
Not only do the Illinois State Police conduct background checks on every FOID and concealed carry application, they also do permit re-checks, which inflates the total number of checks performed every month. NICS isn't only used for background checks on gun sales. 6/
— Cam Edwards (@CamEdwards) May 4, 2021
Note: This isn’t secret information:
This information isn't secret. It's a matter of public record. I have no idea how @CNN could have seen a story about HALF of all gun sales last month coming from the state of Illinois and not thought "something doesn't seem right about this." 7/
— Cam Edwards (@CamEdwards) May 4, 2021
Cam goes on to say this isn’t media bias. It’s worse. It’s media ignorance:
This isn't a case of media bias. It's a case of media ignorance, but unfortunately @CNN's audience is now just as misinformed and mistaken as those who produced this story in the first place. 8/8
— Cam Edwards (@CamEdwards) May 4, 2021
And just like that, poof:
Update: the CNN story has been corrected, and largely re-written in the process. No mention of how they discovered that they got it egregiously wrong, of course. Just one of those things.
— Cam Edwards (@CamEdwards) May 5, 2021
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