CCRKBA: Sanders Misled on Background Checks

Contact: Alan Gottlieb (425) 454-4911

BELLEVUE, WA – Targeting what it calls “harmfully misleading” information, Twitter has identified a tweet from presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders that shows he was all wet when he claimed 40 percent of gun sales in the U.S. didn’t include a background check, so the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms is calling on Sanders to correct the error and apologize.

“Truth always seems to be the first casualty when gun control advocates start talking,” said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb, “but Bernie ought to know better. That 40 percent claim has been debunked so many times in the past, especially when Barack Obama used it, that one would think Sanders might have heard about it. The Washington Post Fact Checker took Obama to the wood shed when he repeated the claim a few years ago, and surely Sanders must remember. He can’t be that long in the tooth.”

Sanders’ Twitter post said this: “Forty percent of the guns in this country are sold without any background checks. We have to end the absurdity of the gun show loophole.” NBC News first reported on the Twitter effort Thursday.

“Bernie’s estimate comes from a very small telephone survey done more than 25 years ago, during the Clinton administration, and it has been discredited,” Gottlieb noted. “But for some reason, this 40 percent claim has become something of an urban legend that too many people persist in repeating. Maybe they think that if they say it often enough, it will become the truth.

“Frankly,” he added, “we’re delighted Twitter is trying to identify disinformation, and using Bernie’s bogus tweet as an example just might send a message to other people—especially his rivals on the Democratic presidential campaign trail—to be more careful, especially when talking about Second Amendment issues.

“It would help for Sanders to come clean and admit the mistake,” Gottlieb suggested. “Then, again, he’s running as a Democrat Socialist, so we probably shouldn’t hold out much hope.”

With more than 650,000 members and supporters nationwide, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (www.ccrkba.org) is one of the nation’s premier gun rights organizations. As a non-profit organization, the Citizens Committee is dedicated to preserving firearms freedoms through active lobbying of elected officials and facilitating grass-roots organization of gun rights activists in local communities throughout the United States.

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