I’ve bought & sold firearms at gun shows in Ohio.

Your early caller who mentioned the many physical tells a potential buyer has that tip him/her off as not someone to sell to is correct. I’ve experienced it multiple times. And refused to sell to them.

I’ve stopped purchasing firearms from nonregistered dealers at gun shows because the firearm purchased ends up being a pig-in-the-poke. I have personally dumped nonfunctional firearms onto the gunshow market. These firearms are only of value to a Collector; a Gunsmith for repair practice or home wall decoration.

Anyone who buys a firearm at a Gun Show from a non-licensed firearm dealer is asking for their “new” firearm to blow up in their face.

I’ve learned the hard way and am happily still whole.

Dan, I thought you did a great job moderating this discussion and pointing out when arbitrary numbers or facts were being tossed into the conversation. Nice to see the focus being kept on the facts.

Dear Sound of Ideas,

All you post online is one measly comment? (ref: Gun Shows and Crime, Tues. Oct. 20) To make matters worse, that comment you posted has inaccurate statements AND the commenter freely admits that he is a lying scam artist. I’m just curious, how many pro-gun-rights rants did you have to sift through to finally get to a comment that you liked? I bet it was a lot.

I’ve purchased more than a dozen used firearms from private sellers at gun shows, and all have functioned flawlessly. You just have to know what to look for, just like when you go buy a used car. Speaking of which, when your commenter admitted that he dumped a malfunctioning gun on an unsuspecting mark, he basically admitted that he cheated someone out of money. That’s identical to unscrupulously dumping a lemon (car), while advertising it as a cream puff. People like that are scum. Odd that you would choose his comment for posting…

Your treatment of this subject was also not very balanced. The host was pretty obviously pro gun control. He could barely contain himself at times. Where were the hard questions for the gun control panelists? I could smell the grapefruits he was lobbing them from my car radio. Some would say that the root cause of the problems in our inner cities is not firearms, but concentrated poverty and ridiculous drug laws that put gangs in business in the first place. Why didn’t your host ask your anti-gun guests if they would get better results pursuing urban policies that don’t bottle up a bunch of poor minorities in ghettos where the illegal trade of drugs is sometimes their only option for gainful employment? How about questions about why hip-hop culture is allowed to gain acceptability in our society when it often times promotes extreme violence? Do you honestly expect intelligent people to believe that a few new gun laws will fix the problem downtown? The current gun laws are wholesale ignored by the criminals there. They’ll have enough drug money to buy illegal guns no matter how much you try to control gun rights. But, your host already has his mind made up, so he didn’t ask those questions. My recommendation is to not run a piece like this during a pledge drive.

There is a point of view held by many in this country to which you have neither educated yourselves nor done justice with your program. Private gun ownership is a necessity in this country, especially for those of us living near downtown. Gun control advocates are proposing a few new gun laws as a first step to total abolition, not as an end itself. You should dig a little deeper into the narrow views held by Bloomberg, the Brady Center and the VPC. They are completely uninterested in any other solution to violence other than the total removal of private citizen gun rights. They could care less about poverty or any other root cause of violence.

Normally your show has a nice exchange of ideas and viewpoints, but this time I think you fell a little flat. I particularly blame the host of the show in this regard. This issue is a lot more nuanced, and the gun control crowd works very hard to block those ideas from public forums. Had your host been a little more open minded and done his homework, he might have been able to address that issue. I’ll probably still donate during this pledge drive, but right at this moment I am fairly irritated with your station over this particular segment. Almost as much as I was when one of Ed Gordon’s News and Notes guests suggested that the shooting of a police officer during a specific traffic stop may have been justified, and that the perpetrator, Joanne Chesimard, was potentially not a violent criminal in that case but a political refugee living in Cuba. Those are the kind of ideas we can do without, thank you.

Mike Adams