For gun bill, unusual partners
Democrats and the NRA negotiate legislation to close loopholes exposed by the Virginia Tech tragedy.
from the June 13, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
NICS was created as a result of the 1993 Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act. It required federally licensed gun dealers to check gun buyers' backgrounds to ensure they didn't have any criminal convictions or mental-health adjudications that would prohibit them from purchasing a firearm.
NICS become fully operational and permanent in 1998. But it soon became apparent the system had plenty of problems. The first, according to critics, is that it applied only to federally licensed gun dealers, who account for an estimated half of all guns sales in the United States.
Other problems also surfaced, such as processing delays, incomplete information, and confusion among states about which records they were required to submit to NICS. For instance, 25 states have computerized only 60 percent of their criminal records, according to a report by the Legal Community Against Violence, a legal-services organization in San Francisco dedicated to ending gun violence. That means 40 percent of felony convictions in these states don't make it into the federal database system right away.
But the biggest problems are associated with domestic-violence and mental-health records. Thirteen states simply do not share information about domestic-violence restraining orders, and 33 states have not computerized or do not share records about mental-health adjudications, as required by the federal law.
There are also inconsistencies between state and federal law, which became tragically apparent recently in Virginia. The gunman at Virginia Tech, Seung-Hui Cho, had been ordered by a judge to get mental help. Under federal law, that would automatically disqualify him from buying a gun. But Virginia law requires that a person be committed before he or she is disqualified from buying a gun. As a result, Mr. Cho's mental adjudication was never entered into the NICS system, and he was able to buy two semiautomatic pistols.
For many in Congress, it was one too many examples of NICS not doing what it was originally intended to do.
"The NRA has an interest in seeing to it that the law works, as do I," said Dingell in a phone interview. "To have the law work … we have to separate the people who should be eligible to buy a firearm from those who are not. That's what the NICS system is supposed to do."
Some gun-control advocates are concerned that the legislation doesn't require buyers in private gun sales to undergo background checks. Calls for comment about the compromise to the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence went unanswered as of this writing. It is unclear whether the organization will support the bill.
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