Advocates, after shootings, urge gun waiting periods
Not long before the deadly Atlantaarea shootings spread fear and anger through Asian American communities nationwide, police say the attacker made a legal purchase: a 9mm handgun.
Within hours, they say, he had killed eight people, seven of them women and six of Asian descent, in a rampage targeting massage businesses.
If Georgia had required him to wait before getting a gun, lawmakers and advocates say, he might not have acted on his impulse.
“It’s really quick. You walk in, fill out the paperwork, get your background check and walk out with a gun,” said Robyn Thomas, executive director of the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. “If you’re in a state of crisis, personal crisis, you can do a lot of harm fairly quickly.”
The purchase was a normal transaction at Big Woods Goods, a shop north of Atlanta that complies with federal background check laws and is cooperating with police, said Matt Kilgo, a lawyer for the store. “There’s no indication there’s anything improper,” he said.
The vast majority of states are like Georgia, allowing buyers to walk
out of a store with a firearm after a background check that sometimes can take minutes. Waiting periods are required in just 10 states and the District of Columbia, although several states are considering legislation this year to impose them.
Gun control advocates say mandating a window of even a couple of days between the purchase of a gun and taking possession can give more time for background checks and create a “cooling off ” period for people considering harming themselves or someone else. Studies suggest that waiting periods may help bring down firearm suicide rates by up to 11% and gun homicides by about 17%, according to the Giffords Center.
Georgia Democrats plan to introduce legislation that would require people to wait five days between buying a gun and getting it, said Rep. David Wilkerson, who is minority whip in the state House. “I think a waiting period just makes sense,” he said.
California has one of the country’s longest waiting periods — 10 days. That did not stop more than 1.1 million people from buying guns last year, which was just shy of the record number sold in 2016. Gun sales nationwide, meanwhile, surged to record levels last year amid pandemicrelated uncertainty.
Against that backdrop, lawmakers in at least four states — Arizona, New York, Pennsylvania and Vermont — have proposed creating or expanding waiting periods.
New gun laws will not fix deepseated problems such as racism, misogyny and violence, said Seo Yoon Yang of Students Demand Action, a gun violence prevention group. But they can help keep guns away from people who would do harm in the meantime, she said.
“Research shows that it works,” she said. “It is change that can happen efficiently and quickly.”
In Colorado, Democratic state Rep. Tom Sullivan ran for office after his son, Alex, died along with 11 others when a gunman opened fire in an Aurora movie theater eight years ago. Sullivan said he hopes a waiting period in legislation he’s planning to sponsor could help curb domestic violence and suicide.
“In Atlanta, imagine if this guy’s parents or somebody else were notified that he was trying to get a firearm. Maybe they could have helped,” he said. “It wouldn’t have hurt anybody to wait.”
Gun rights groups, including the National Rifle Association, oppose waiting periods. The group points to 2018 federal firearmtracing data that shows the average time between first retail sale of a gun and involvement in a crime was nearly nine years. They also argue that waiting periods create a delay for people buying legally, while leaving illegal weapons transfers unaffected.
“A right delayed is a right denied,” Second Amendment Foundation founder Alan Gottlieb said.