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Interestingly, there's an editor's caveat at the bottom of Fox's article, which states, quote
EDITOR'S NOTE: A previous version of this report misstated government figures on guns obtained through the black market and used in crimes. unquote
Let's see now, Joe's cited newspeek article mentions a recent DoJ study, but the cited article failed to provide a link to the DoJ's actual 'recent' study.
So here is the link to the 2019 DoJ study: https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/suficspi16.pdf which states, in part,
1. "...about 1 in 5 (21%) of all state and federal prisoners reported that they had possessed or carried a frearm when they committed the ofense for which they were serving time in prison (fgure 1).
2. The 2016 SPI data collection was conducted from January through October 2016. The SPI was formerly known as the Survey of Inmates in State and Federal Correctional Facilities (SISFCF).
Now according to Bureau of Justice states , "...approximately 14,500 inmates in State prisons and 3,700 in Federal prisons were interviewed. The sample for the 2004 surveys were selected from 1,585 State prisons and 148 Federal prisons.'
Interesting statistic here:
The American criminal justice system holds almost 2.3 million people in 1,719 state prisons, 102 federal prisons, 1,852 juvenile correctional facilities, 3,163 local jails, and 80 Indian Country jails as well as in military prisons, immigration detention facilities, civil commitment centers, state psychiatric hospitals, and prisons in the U.S. territories.
Quite different numbers from 20k inmates surveyed to 2.3M persons actually incarcerated!
The BoJ's survey can be found here, https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/sisfcf04_q.pdf and contains 10 individual questionnaire sections, with some sections containing upwards to 50 pages of questions, here is a sample question:
How did you obtain the (Insert response from S5Q17b1)?
(1) I stole it
(2) I rented it
(3) I borrowed it from somebody/held it for somebody
(4) I traded something for it
(5) I bought it
(6) It was a gift
(7) Other - Specify _______________________________
(D) Don't know
(R) Refused - Skip to S5Q17i
Bottom line, newspeek article, referenced a self serving generated DoJ report and that the DoJ's PI author used flawed data, to create their self-promoting document from extremely outdated data from a very small subset of the US prison population.