“We flood communities with so many guns that it is easier for a teenager to buy a Glock than get his hands on a computer or even a book.”
Both Washington Post and Politifact interviewed Dr. John Lott about this quote.
— From the Washington Post, which gave Obama 3 out of 4 Pinocchios.
Federal law prohibits licensed firearms dealers from selling a handgun, such as a Glock, to people under 21 years old. It prohibits unlicensed people, like family, from selling or transferring handguns to anyone under 18. In most states, you need to be at least 18 to purchase and own a handgun.
Public libraries, on the other hand, generally don’t have an age limit or a background check for children to get a library card and access books and computers for free.
John Lott, a gun-rights analyst who runs Crime Prevention Research Center, sent us this calculation as an example of access to free public resources for books and computers: There are 80 public libraries and 95 public high schools in Chicago, within a city of about 230 square miles. That comes out to a library or high school every 1.3 square miles, albeit not equally spread out throughout the city. . . .
The Washington Post article also appeared in other newspapers around the country (e.g., Alaska Dispatch News (Anchorage, Alaska), Reading Eagle (Reading, Pennsylvania), and The Journal (Cortez, Colorado)).
— From Politifact, which found Obama’s claim “mostly false.”
“It is already against federal law for someone under the age of 21 to buy a handgun, such as a Glock, from a licensed firearms dealer,” said John R. Lott, Jr., president of the generally pro-gun Crime Prevention Research Center. And federal law on handguns also makes it unlawful for anyone “to sell, deliver, or otherwise transfer (a handgun) to a person who the transferor knows or has reasonable cause to believe is a juvenile” — that is, under 18. . . . .
That would make them easily more expensive than books purchased at a store, and certainly more expensive than books borrowed for free from a library.
“There are 80 public libraries in Chicago and 95 public high schools and 92 private high schools in the city,” Lott said. . . .
The Politifact article was also repeated in numerous media outlets including the Atlanta Journal Constitution and the Austin-American Statesman.
The information supplied by the Obama administration to justify Obama’s claim is available here. This is the link that they provided to the Washington Post. Yet, it provides no evidence regarding a comparison to books or computers.
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