Later this month, the Senate is expected to begin debating a Democrat-backed bill to vastly expand the federal background check system for gun buyers. The proposed legislation, part of President Barack Obama's recent push to curb gun violence, would close the so-called gun show loophole that allows a substantial minority of overall gun sales to take place without background checks.
The bill's proponents say fewer domestic abusers, felons and mentally ill people will be able to buy weapons if Congress passes it. The National Rifle Association, however, says expanding the checks won't stop crime, because most criminals get their guns on the black market. The group also pointed out that gaping holes in the national background check system make it ineffective.
So what does the background check system do, and who will be prevented from buying weapons if it expands to cover every gun purchase?
The National Instant Criminal
Background Check System (NICS), which is managed by the FBI, quickly
checks the name of a prospective buyer against federal and state
criminal records to see if he or she is disqualified from buying a gun.
Federal law prevents the sale of weapons to people who have been
convicted of a felony, have a warrant out for their arrest, have used
drugs within the past year, were committed involuntarily to a mental
institution or ruled mentally incompetent by a judge, are living in the
U.S. illegally, have a domestic-violence-related restraining order
against them or have a misdemeanor domestic violence conviction. People
who were dishonorably discharged from the military or who have renounced
their U.S. citizenship are also barred from gun purchases.
Between 1998 and 2010, the Justice Department turned down just 2.1
million of 118 million gun applications, most of them people with felony
convictions who tried to purchase a gun.But some people—including at least one mass murderer, Seung-Hui Cho—who should not have been allowed to buy guns have slipped through the cracks over the same period.
The problem is states vary greatly in the amount and quality of information they provide to the database, especially when it comes to mental health issues. (The federal government cannot compel the states to share all their records with the database, though it can offer them financial incentives to do so.)
In 2007, Cho was able to buy a
weapon from a licensed dealer and then kill 32 people at Virginia Tech,
even though he had been declared mentally ill by a judge in 2005. The
state never submitted that record to NICS, so his name cleared the
database when he bought the gun. The incident spurred 18 states to pass laws requiring agencies to report more mental health information to the database,
and a Government Accountability Office report from last year found that
mental health records in the system increased eightfold from 2004 to
2011.
A 2010 Justice Department report also
identified problems with states' reporting records on people convicted
of domestic violence misdemeanors or who are under restraining orders.
Some states do not know how to determine which orders are still active,
while others don't maintain records on restraining orders at all.
Even if all the holes in the
database are eventually filled, some gun researchers think federal law
does not go far enough in prohibiting people who may be at risk for
becoming violent from buying weapons.
Daniel Webster, a professor of health policy and management at the
Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, says based on his
research he believes more categories of people should be prohibited from
buying weapons. People who have temporary domestic-violence-related
restraining orders against them, for example, can still buy and own
weapons under federal law. Federal law also counts only couples who have
lived together or were married in the definition of domestic violence.
So an ex-boyfriend with an active order of protection out against him
could still buy a weapon if he was never married or lived with his
former partner.Webster also thinks there's an argument for excluding people with multiple drunken driving convictions from buyng weapons, because those who abuse alcohol are at an increased risk for committing violent crimes.
"The research indicates that people who have problems with alcohol actually have much greater risk for being violent than those who use illegal drugs," Webster said. Current law also allows people aged 18 or older to buy weapons from private dealers, while people have to be 21 to buy from a licensed seller.
But Dave Kopel, a professor at Denver University and an analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, said the current law sometimes excludes too many people from their constitutional right to own a weapon to defend themselves.
Kopel said the current background
check system mainly catches buyers who don't realize that a past
infraction prevents them from legally buying a weapon, such as "some guy
who got into a fight with his live-in girlfriend in 1977, threw a
coffee cup against the wall ... and pleaded guilty to disturbing the
peace." Those who know they can't own a weapon go to the black market,
he said. LINK
Posts
