Start with a misguided Attorney General, sprinkle in Congressmen with selective reading skills, and top it off with chunky lobbyists and you’ve got a tasty dish.
Unfortunately for those of us who prefer to have streets free of illegal handguns, that recipe has resulted in an unconscionable undermining of public safety.
On Jan. 22, the Senate passed an Omnibus spending bill which contained, among other cleverly placed amendments, a gutting of the law enforcement community’s ability to keep tabs on the gun industry.
The bill’s provisions will not only make it virtually impossible to audit our system of background checks (which has now prevented almost 1 million illegal gun purchases), but will also greatly inhibit the ATF’s ability to regulate gun dealers and ensure that they maintain proper inventory measures.
Since the passage of the Brady Bill in 1993, each handgun purchaser is required to undergo a background check to ensure he/she is a legal buyer. The ATF and other law enforcement were able to monitor this system by keeping records of said background checks for 90 days. Now, all records will be destroyed within 24 hours.
The 90 day period was a sensible compromise. Destroying the records after three months prevents legal buyers from having their information on file indefinitely, but also allows sufficient time to review and correct sales that were allowed due to glitches in the system.
A sensible compromise, that is, to everyone but the National Rifle Association and their cabinet compadre, Attorney General John Ashcroft, who initially proposed the 24-hour records destruction back in June 2001. Before Congress would give the go-ahead, however, they commissioned their General Accounting Office (GAO) to study the effects of changing from 90 days to 24 hours.
According to Eric Howard, Assistant Communications Director for the Brady Campaign, a D.C.-based lobby group, Congress was attempting to collect data in order to make the most prudent policy. Sadly, though, this was data they would eventually ignore.
“When you destroy these records,” Howard explained, “you’re preventing the government from auditing the system to make sure it’s not being abused. The GAO determined that hundreds of criminals will be armed because of this policy, and that’s indefensible.”
Over 200 criminals, to be more precise: and that was just in the six-month study. In the 11 plus years of Brady Bill policy, that would be over 4,000 handguns slipping through the cracks.
Howard and the Brady Campaign’s sentiments have been echoed by a myriad of respected law enforcement groups, including the F.B.I. and the Law Enforcement Steering Committee, an umbrella group that includes the National Association of Police Officers. Luckily for Congress, they didn’t have to go on the record as supporting these asinine concessions to the NRA — they’re on record as voting for an appropriations bill, a fiscal necessity, which happened to have amendments about guns.
Howard said that “This bill would not have passed if the public knew about it and it was debated. It could only pass with a sneaky measure, sticking it on a spending bill.”
When the law enforcement community, common-sense gun control lobby, and even their own statistics were against them, can you hardly blame them for “sneaky” measures? They threw a bone to the NRA, but did it in such a way as to avoid headlines like, “Senator votes to let illegal gun activities off the hook” (both of Louisiana’s Senators voted for this puppy, by the way).
I should mention law enforcement is frightened by the other boogeyman tucked into the Omnibus, a regulation preventing the ATF from requiring gun dealers to take an annual physical inventory. The NRA was able to hammer this through, as well, despite ATF records which “confirm that inventory errors are occurring at a high rate…a serious problem because a firearm missing from inventory cannot be traced.”
These sloppy inventory practices, which are now safe from ATF regulation, were taken advantage of recently by two people: John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo.