About 2 percent of the criminals who use guns in their crimes get those guns at retail gun stores.
About 80 percent of the murders are committed by people with prior arrest records, in most cases including a criminal conviction.
The problem isn’t the regulations that apply to sporting-goods stores. The only reason to focus on the 2-percent correlation rather than the 80-percent correlation is political cowardice and intellectual dishonesty.
The population of violent-crime offenders is about 1 million a year. The population of gun-store customers is about 40 million a year. Do we want to go looking for a needle in a haystack or a needle in 40 haystacks?