Conventional wisdom has been that people who are barred from buying guns would buy them off the street or purchase them through unlicensed sellers at gun shows or other private parties.
But a new Department of Justice report suggests that more than 160,000 people -- three-fourths of them convicted felons -- were stopped from buying guns in the first year of computerized instant criminal background checks. In total, more than 8.7 million checks were performed. Most checks took seconds and nearly all were completed within two hours.These numbers are good news on two fronts: Background checks are closing off one avenue of gun purchase for people who are barred by law from buying them, and the checks were efficient enough that legitimate gun buyers were not unduly inconvenienced.
Since February 1994, the Brady Act has barred more than 470,000 prohibited people from acquiring firearms, according to the Justice Department.
Even though technology has enabled law enforcers to conduct nearly instantaneous background checks on prospective gun buyers, some in the gun lobby grouse about the system. Primarily, they are critical of the Justice Department for charging but a fraction of those denied guns with illegally attempting to buy one.
Clearly, prosecuting all of the denied people would deluge the federal court system. However, the gun lobby's point is well taken. Surely, authorities have other tools at their disposal. Reports of attempts to purchase guns should be forwarded to state and federal probation and parole agencies, which could conceivably use the information to revoke a felony offender's parole or probation.
The first-year results of the National Instant Criminal Background Check System are encouraging. Of the prospective buyers denied firearms in FBI checks, 72 percent were known felons, 12 percent were convicted of domestic abuse; 4 percent were abusers of illegal drugs; 3 percent were subjects to domestic violence restraining orders and 3 percent were fugitives from justice. The remaining 6 percent included the mentally ill, those dishonorably discharged from the military, people who had renounced U.S. citizenship and illegal aliens.
According to the Justice Department, half the denials were issued by the FBI and the remainder by the states.
Such checks will help keep guns out of the wrong hands, but the public should not be lulled into a sense of complacency. People who are bent on committing violent crimes will find a means to circumvent legal processes to obtains guns. It is those means that must be addressed next.