A View through the Gun Show Loophole

The term Gun Show Loophole came about as a result of the passage of the Firearm Owners Protection Act of 19861 and the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act of 1993. These laws effectively created a dual standard for gun sales based on the federal license status of the seller. The Brady Act mandated that licensed gun dealers must conduct criminal background checks on potential buyers regardless of whether the sale takes place at the dealer\u27s store or at a gun show, whereas the Firearm Owners Protection Act expressly exempted persons making occasional sales or selling all or part of a personal collection from the need to obtain a federal license to sell firearms. Thus, a private individual who is not considered to be engaged in the business of buying and selling guns, or who sells occasionally, is not required, or even allowed, to conduct a background check on a prospective buyer. The reason for the exception to the background check requirement for private sellers was to allow for the unregulated sale or transfer of guns between friends and relatives or the occasional sale of guns by individuals from their personal collection

A View through the Gun Show Loophole

The term Gun Show Loophole came about as a result of the passage of the Firearm Owners Protection Act of 19861 and the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act of 1993. These laws effectively created a dual standard for gun sales based on the federal license status of the seller. The Brady Act mandated that licensed gun dealers must conduct criminal background checks on potential buyers regardless of whether the sale takes place at the dealer\u27s store or at a gun show, whereas the Firearm Owners Protection Act expressly exempted persons making occasional sales or selling all or part of a personal collection from the need to obtain a federal license to sell firearms. Thus, a private individual who is not considered to be engaged in the business of buying and selling guns, or who sells occasionally, is not required, or even allowed, to conduct a background check on a prospective buyer. The reason for the exception to the background check requirement for private sellers was to allow for the unregulated sale or transfer of guns between friends and relatives or the occasional sale of guns by individuals from their personal collection

Firearm Deaths of American Minors: Perceptions vs. Facts

Firearm violence is now the leading cause of death for Americans under the age of eighteen. This article demonstrates that widely held misconceptions about the true nature and extent of this violence have led to legislative proposals narrowly tailored toward firearm violence in schools, despite facts and data showing school firearm violence to be a small fraction of the problem. These misconceptions are caused by both the narrow focus of national media attention and the deceptive propaganda of the gun industry. The article concludes by examining several bills proposed during the Virginia General Assembly session of 2022 to show how many of the solutions that legislators are proposing are not only ineffective, but also potentially harmful

Empirical evaluation of selective DNA pooling to map QTL in dairy cattle using a half-sib design by comparison to individual genotyping and interval mapping

This study represents the first attempt at an empirical evaluation of the DNA pooling methodology by comparing it to individual genotyping and interval mapping to detect QTL in a dairy half-sib design. The findings indicated that the use of peak heights from the pool electropherograms without correction for stutter (shadow) product and preferential amplification performed as well as corrected estimates of frequencies. However, errors were found to decrease the power of the experiment at every stage of the pooling and analysis. The main sources of errors include technical errors from DNA quantification, pool construction, inconsistent differential amplification, and from the prevalence of sire alleles in the dams. Additionally, interval mapping using individual genotyping gains information from phenotypic differences between individuals in the same pool and from neighbouring markers, which is lost in a DNA pooling design. These errors cause some differences between the markers detected as significant by pooling and those found significant by interval mapping based on individual selective genotyping. Therefore, it is recommended that pooled genotyping only be used as part of an initial screen with significant results to be confirmed by individual genotyping. Strategies for improving the efficiency of the DNA pooling design are also presented

Characterising the relationship between responsible sourcing and organisational reputation in construction firms

Responsible Sourcing (RS), the ethical management of sustainability issues through the construction supply chain, first achieved national prominence in the UK 2008 Strategy for Sustainable Construction. This set a target for 25% of all construction products to be sourced from schemes recognized for RS by 2012. The Building Research Establishment (BRE) published a framework standard, BES 6001, in 2009 to enable construction firms to certify their products as responsibly sourced to help achieve this target; since then, 80 BES 6001 certificates have been issued to around 40 companies in the UK. RS has its roots in the corporate social responsibility (CSR) agenda and, although it has become a distinct focus within procurement and sustainability management practices in some firms, it is still an under-theorised concept; understanding the role it plays in relation to an organisation’s reputation is a subject area that is noticeably absent from the literature. Although it has been suggested that robust links between the broader CSR agenda and corporate reputation are yet to be established, there is evidence that reputational protection is a key driver for an organisation to engage with RS. Based on a critical review of the literature, this paper aims to stimulate debate on the characteristics of organisational reputation in construction firms and understand the relationship between RS and reputation. It takes into account internal and external stakeholders’ perspectives and the extent to which focussing on protecting reputation can or should take precedence over bottom-line benefits

What Can Open Access Do for Me? Personal Perspectives of KU Faculty

Four University of Kansas faculty presented as panelists during this event. Slides from their presentations are shared here

Improved Combination of Multiple Atmospheric GCM Ensembles for Seasonal Prediction

An improved Bayesian optimal weighting scheme is developed and used to combine six atmospheric general circulation model (GCM) seasonal hindcast ensembles. The approach is based on the prior belief that the forecast probabilities of tercile-category precipitation and near-surface temperature are equal to the climatological ones. The six GCMs are integrated over the 1950–97 period with observed monthly SST prescribed at the lower boundary, with 9–24 ensemble members. The weights of the individual models are determined by maximizing the log likelihood of the combination by season over the integration period. A key ingredient of the scheme is the climatological equal-odds forecast, which is included as one of the "models" in the multimodel combination. Simulation skill is quantified in terms of the cross-validated ranked probability skill score (RPSS) for the three-category probabilistic hindcasts. The individual GCM ensembles, simple poolings of three and six models, and the optimally combined multimodel ensemble are compared. The Bayesian optimal weighting scheme outperforms the pooled ensemble, which in turn outperforms the individual models. In the extratropics, its main benefit is to bring much of the large area of negative-precipitation RPSS values up to near-zero values. The skill of the optimal combination is almost always increased (in the large spatial averages considered) when the number of models in the combination is increased from three to six, regardless of which models are included in the three-model combination. Improvements are made to the original Bayesian scheme of Rajagopalan et al. by reducing the dimensionality of the numerical optimization, averaging across data subsamples, and including spatial smoothing of the likelihood function. These modifications are shown to yield increases in cross-validated RPSS skills. The revised scheme appears to be better suited to combining larger sets of models, and, in the future, it should be possible to include statistical models into the weighted ensemble without fundamental difficulty