America’s regular mass shootings leads to the hand-wringing that our politics is so polarized that there’s no way to move forward.
AR-15-style rifles may be here to stay, so the most important thing we can do is modernize background checks which have some bipartisan consensus. There is substantial progress, but now we need more.
The F.B.I.’s Background Check System, stitches together three databases of state and federal criminal history records and other so-called hot files. Set up in 1993, when gun checks were largely the province of the states.
This checks records to either approve consumer purchases from federally licensed firearms dealers or deny them to 10 categories of prohibited people.
These are: felons, fugitives, convicted drug users, people in the country illegally, people who’ve renounced U.S. citizenship, anyone dishonorably discharged from the military, people under a restraining order in regard to an intimate partner or convicted of a misdemeanor violent crime and anyone who has been adjudicated as mentally defective or committed to a psychiatric institution.
The system still has enormous data gaps, loopholes and disputes over how those prohibited categories should be defined.
Missing even one critical record, can lead to tragedies.
Mental health records provide an especially vexing example. State privacy laws frequently prohibit the sharing of records — health care providers are hesitant too — and most states lack a contact person to collect the information and send it to the F.B.I.
In April 2007, Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 people at Virginia Tech University with guns he bought despite a documented history of court-ordered mental health treatment — records of which never made their way into the system.
Early reporting indicates that Mauricio Garcia, the gunman who this month killed eight people outside Dallas, was in 2008 expelled from the Army after three months, perhaps because of mental health issues. This lead to a dishonorable discharge and triggered a bar on obtaining a gun.
A 2013 study by the National Consortium for Justice Information and Statistics concluded that as much as a quarter of felony convictions were not available in NICS. Orders deriving from domestic relations cases may reside only in local courthouses and are challenging to untangle. Many drug arrests don’t make their way into the system, either.
In 2021 the families of nine people massacred at Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, S.C., reached an $88 million settlement with the Justice Department of their suit alleging that gaps in NICS data enabled the racist killer to obtain a gun despite his earlier drug arrest.
But there has been important progress. Congress passed and President George W. Bush signed the NICS Improvement Act, intended to provide the states grants to get more of their mental health and other records to NICS. Thirty-two grants to state-level agencies totaling $42.4 million were awarded through the 2020 fiscal year.
In January 2016 the Department of Health and Human Services finalized rules to clarify that the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act of 1996, or HIPAA, was not an obstacle to the reporting of mental health records.
Today 36 states have laws requiring the reporting of mental health records to the FBI. The number of those records in the system has soared, to 6.88 million early this year from 531,000 at the end of 2008. The number of purchases that were blocked because of mental health issues advanced in lock step.
Last year’s Bipartisan Safer Communities Act provided new challenges and opportunities. The law expands the gun purchase prohibition for people convicted of domestic violence or subject to a restraining order to include dating partners, not just people married to or living with the victim. Reformers applauded this closing of the boyfriend loophole, but the worry is that many criminal history records don’t clarify whether such relationships existed.
A more basic problem involves simply identifying the prospective gun buyer. In 2023, are we really going to continue to allow purchasers to show only a driver’s license, an easily and regularly forged document?
Common sense — argues that buyers should be required to provide fingerprints, which would be read at a gun
These are issues that cry out for more — more general attention, more media coverage, more bully pulpit focus from police chiefs and F.B.I. honchos and the president and this Congress, more appropriated money and more public shaming of lazy or recalcitrant state and local governments and health care providers who know someone is dangerous.
Other proposed changes could be more important — closing the loophole that exempts gun shows and private transactions from NICS and closing the so-called Charleston loophole, which forces the system to approve gun sales after three days even if investigators need more time to unearth relevant records, as happened in the massacre there. Fair enough. But those issues at this time are politically gridlocked.
Closing background loopholes is a task within our grasp. Isn’t that more important than watching helplessly as the death toll continues to grow?
Source: Gordon Witkin, Nk Times