Educational Media Reviews Online

The film 91% weaves an emotional tale of survivors of gun violence with a relentless hammering of two points, 91% of Americans supposedly agree all gun sales without exception should be regulated and this is a “reasonable gun control measure.”

It starts with the terrible story a mother who lost her daughter to a mall shooter, then recaps the history of America’s gun laws, from the 1934 law which the NRA helped craft as well as the 1968 act prohibiting interstate sales of firearms to the Brady Bill of 1994 that made background checks mandatory for all licensed dealers. Much of the film centers on other victims telling how they ended up injured, some terribly, by guns that would not have been in the shooters hands were there proper gun controls, meaning stopped by a background check. The stories are truly tragic, whether told by the victims themselves, parents of victims or staff at the Sandy Hook Elementary school where the mass shooting took place. Somber music is played with the interviewee’s tales.

In between the personal accounts which are the bulk of the film are shown some of the political actions for gun control. The unsuccessful passing of the 2012 Manchin-Toomey Bill that would have required background checks on most private party firearm sales was depicted as being defeated (54-46) due to the deep pockets of the NRA lobbyists and nothing else. Afterwards a spokeswoman for Coalition for Gun Violence Prevention depicts the NRA as puppets of the gun manufacturers who need to keep their markets. A segment on the NRA filmed at a national convention ends with the voice of the NRA president, off camera, while viewing the NRA headquarters that total gun sale regulation leads to a Federal gun registry, good only for taxation and confiscation.

The film gives a strong impression of the country moving toward tighter gun controls, ending with the January 5, 2016 proposal by President Obama supposedly standing up to the gun lobby with the executive orders to crack down on unregulated Internet gun sales.

The premise of the movie of total gun transfer regulation is treated as a panacea, if only we are “reasonable.” Canada spent over 1.2 billion dollars over 10 years on it, only to abandon it after it solved zero crimes. Background checks do not stop criminals from stealing firearms, getting them on the black market, or from friends or family members. The Department of Justice statistics notes less than 1% of criminals get firearms from dealers or at gun shows and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearm notes a similar figure of 6% at gun shows and flea markets. The guns used by the Sandy Hook Elementary shooter were owned by his mother. 91%. That number from polls by CNN and CBS for example say approximately 91% favor stronger gun control laws by having universal background checks for all firearms transfers. But when the National Shooting Sports Foundation in 2013 found that when respondents were informed by the questioner that gun show purchases already fall under the background check net, support for additional background check requirements fell to 40%. Further, on November 2014 liberal Washington State barely passed a private sales background check initiative with 59% after millions of anti-gun dollars were spent promoting it.

Actually statistics show an opposite conclusion of many of the points of the film. As the holders of concealed weapons have increased, the murder rate has actually decreased by 25% according to the Crime Prevention Research Institute. The 25 states with the highest number of concealed permits have the lowest murder and crime rates. According to Criminologist Gary Kleck of Florida State University, there were approximately 2.5 million incidents a year when firearms are used in self-defense.

There further appears to be cherry picking of the data. The film uses the repeal of Missouri’s “universal background check” law as causing an increase in murder rates. Nineteen other states in the union have universal background checks or similar laws, but only one was chosen at a certain point in time and it addressed only murder rates. Brief research shows John Hopkins Bloomberg (yes, the billionaire anti-gun advocate) School of Public Health only looked at the time period from 2008 to 2012 after the background checks law was repealed instead of examining the change in crime rates to include before the law was enacted in 1981. In the five-year period after the law was enacted, the murder rate went up faster in Missouri than it did in other states around it, but in the five-year period before the law was enacted the murder rate was going up even faster.

While the stories of the shooting victims was well done and moving, the total bias against guns and misuse of statistics prevents this film from being a part of the gun control discussion.