From: Daniel Humphreys
Columbus
In his column of Dec. 3, John Krull makes the claim that “the NRA … by the way, receives the overwhelming majority of its funding not from its members but from firearms manufacturers.”
Consulting publicly available IRS reporting from 2004 to 2013, “73 percent of all NRA funding comes from membership dues and individual contributions, 9 percent comes from advertising and 5 percent comes from organizational donations. The latter two figures are rounded up.” I did not attend Franklin College, but my basic math skills tell me that 14 percent, assuming all organizational donations are from manufacturers, in no way consists of a majority. This information is easily found with a cursory Internet search.
As a columnist for this publication and as a professor of journalism, one would expect that you would conduct some basic fact checking and at the very least attempt some measure of honesty in the making of such hyperbolic statements. It shows a basic lack of journalistic ethics, and as the saying goes, sir, you are entitled to your own opinion, but you are not entitled to your own facts.
As far as your citation of the survey conducted by Ball State and WISH-TV, that survey encompassed a staggering (sarcasm intended) 602 Hoosiers, resulting in a 5.2 percent margin of error. The anti-gun Holy Grail of “universal background checks” is also laughable considering that the wording of the question implies no such checks currently exist for gun shows when in fact any individual buying a firearm from a licensed dealer (yes, even at a gun show) must pass a background check. The UBC talking point is couched language for requiring the tracking of all sales, whether between private individuals, family or friends.
Such a requirement would result in a de facto registry of firearms, which Indiana did, admittedly, once have. It was done away with some time ago, and strangely enough gun crime has fallen in Indiana, as it has nationally, by nearly 50 percent in the last 20 years.
