Our view: Enforce existing gun control laws to save lives
Gary Martin was exactly the kind of person that gun control background checks — a federal system now 25 years old — were designed to catch. They failed. Again.
In Mississippi in 1994, Martin stabbed his girlfriend with a kitchen knife, beat her with a baseball bat, and warned “we are all going to die” if she left him. He never should have been able to buy a gun after that. But many years later, shopping for a gun in Illinois, Martin lied about his criminal past, and a federal background check missed his felony conviction.
Martin bought himself a Smith & Wesson .40-caliber handgun.
Illinois authorities later discovered the error and revoked Martin’s firearm permit. But all that happened next was a letter from the state police telling him to give up his gun. He didn’t. Instead, in February, as he was being fired from a warehouse job in Aurora, Martin killed five co-workers and wounded five police officers before being shot to death.
Last week, two important pieces of gun control legislation passed the House of Representatives. One closes the so-called gun show loophole by requiring universal background checks, an idea favored by 85 percent of Americans. The other extends the background review period from three days to 10, allowing more time for disqualifying records to be found.
Both bills have an unlikely future in the Republican-controlled Senate. But improvements of any kind will ultimately fall short when existing laws are not vigorously applied. Americans can hardly be expected to get behind new gun laws when authorities keep bungling old ones.
The Brady Law of 1993, mandating criminal background checks, has never been adequately enforced. (The National Instant Criminal Background Check System, or NICS, administered by the FBI, was established in 1998 in response to Brady.)
Nearly 1.5 million people have been denied firearms under the system. But unlawful purchases still occur because agencies fail to provide NICS with necessary records or don’t follow up when mistakes are made.
And people keep dying.
The Air Force failed to notify NICS about the criminal record of a discharged airman who then bought an assault-style rifle and killed 26 people at a Texas church in 2017.
A report last year found 112,000 cases in 2017 where people lied about their backgrounds to buy a gun, a felony. Only 12 cases were prosecuted.
Some progress has been made. Last year, Congress passed legislation offering incentives to state and local agencies to improve NICS compliance. But the Justice Department told The Wall Street Journal states have yet to submit millions of records. Federal record submissions have increased by 400 percent, but a requirement that the military do a better job of reporting criminal backgrounds has not been met.
The nation is awash in firearms. The least that federal, state and local agencies can do is enforce existing laws preventing the violent and the mentally ill from acquiring guns.