Propublica is a leftist rag spending a lot of it’s binary ink bitching about guns. The issue I have is in how they deliberately frame and distort facts in order to advance their agenda. Case in point is this headline:
This Gun Shop Stayed Open Despite Repeated Violations. Then A Chicago Cop Was Killed With One Of Its Guns
So how did the gun wind up in the hands of a criminal? Olivia Burgos bought the 10mm Glock handgun from Range USA, in Merrillville, Indiana, on May 27, 2024, by lying on an ATF form about why she bought the gun, where she lived, and about her addiction to illegal drugs. She admitted to buying the gun for her boyfriend, who gave her the money for the gun and was a convicted felon who was not allowed to buy or possess firearms. It’s unknown how the gun made it from the boyfriend to the cop murdering criminal.
The story spins this into an indictment of the gun store itself, claiming that this one gun store had been cited for “serious compliance failures on multiple occasions” by the ATF. One thing that’s important to remember is the chain of stores in question have 50 locations in 14 different states. In other words, this isn’t a gun store, it’s 50 gun stores. There is no mention of just how many citations were issued, nor the severity of most of those issues. The ones that were mentioned are:
- The Merrillville store faced revocation of its license following a 2022 inspection that determined a background check was missing for one sale. The ATF later rescinded the citation after the store provided proof that the background check had actually been conducted. In other words, not a violation.
- In 2021 at the store in Dayton, the ATF determined an employee sold a firearm to a person who failed a background check, records show. Company representatives admitted to the agency that the employee had failed to follow store policy and “missed the appropriate connections” concerning illegal sales, despite training.
- The next year in Lewis Center, an ATF inspector found that a sales clerk had falsified records of a gun sale after accepting an expired conceal-and-carry permit in lieu of conducting a background check
The cop killed that supposedly spawned this article? Yeah, the gun used in the April 26, 2026 murder was in fact sold by Range, USA. In 2024.
Authorities said Bartholomew and another officer transported robbery suspect Alphanso Talley to the hospital April 25 after he claimed to have swallowed narcotics. Prosecutors said Talley pulled a hidden handgun from beneath a blanket while preparing for a CT scan and opened fire on the officers before briefly escaping custody.
So how can you lay this at the feet of the gun store? How is a gun store to know that the woman buying a gun is not going to give it to her drug dealing boyfriend who will soon sell the gun on the black market before two years later, it eventually winds up in the hands of a murderer that kills a cop?
Everyone knows there is no way for the gun store to know this. That isn’t the point. This is being used as some sort of ‘gotya’ to a large firearms retailer. This retailer has 50 store locations- actually, they are each required to have their own FFL, so we are really talking about 50 separate gun stores. What is that? 100,000 guns per year in those 50 stores?
The insinuation of this article is that Range USA is somehow deliberately selling guns to criminals. They don’t come right out and say that, because it isn’t true and they would likely get sued for it. So instead they frame the facts in such a way as to encourage the reader to make that connection themselves. It’s one of the three ways to tell a lie, according to Robert Heinlein:
- lie with a straight face; anybody with enough gall to raise on a busted flush can do that
- The first way to lie artistically is to tell the truth — but not all of it.
- The second way involves telling the truth, too, but is harder: Tell the exact truth and maybe all of it…but tell it so unconvincingly that your listener is sure you are lying.
In leaving out the important details, they are misrepresenting the facts, and this is a form of lying. If you have to lie in order to make your point, perhaps your point isn’t worth making.
