REPORT: Obama DOJ Prosecuted Less Than 1% Of Criminals Who Tried To Buy Guns Illegally

Over 100,000 convicted felons attempted to illegally purchase firearms each year during President Barack Obama’s eight years in the oval office, and the Obama administration did virtually nothing about it.

The Obama Department of Justice (DOJ) only “considered prosecuting” approximately 30 to 40 convicted felons per year who attempted to illegally purchase firearms — roughly .04%, the Daily Caller News Foundation reported.

Key findings from the DCNF’s investigative report include:

• A June 2016 Justice Department Inspector General’s report revealed that between 2008 and 2015 the U.S. Attorney’s office considered prosecuting “less than 32 people per year” for lying on form 4473, the federal application to buy guns. (Lying on an ATF Form 4473 constitutes a felony and is punishable by a $250,000 fine and 10 years in federal prison.)
• Two of every 10 gun denials referred to the ATF was sent to field offices for prosecution, a Justice Department report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2013 and 2014 found. Eight of ten never faced prosecution, according to the report.
• U.S. Attorneys “accepted 80% of ATF field division referrals for consideration of prosecution in calendar years 2002 and 2003, 60% in FY 2008, and 38 percent in FY 2013.”
• Gun control activists may also be surprised that the denial rate for gun applications plummeted during the Obama administration, from 17.2 denials per thousand in 1999 to only 5.5 denials per thousand in 2014, according to a June 2016 Justice Department report by the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Despite the Obama administration’s public stance of being anti-gun, they rarely did anything to prosecute dangerous criminals who tried to obtain firearms illegally.

The DCNF reported that the administration’s toughest critics were, in fact, the gun manufacturers who took issue over Obama’s unwillingness to prosecute criminals seeking to obtain firearms.

A high-level FBI official confirmed to the DCNF that there were serious problems under the Obama administration.

“When I was there, it was running around 100,000 a year of firearm purchasers that tried to go through to buy guns. I think it’s more than 100,000 now,” Daniel D. Roberts, FBI Assistant Director of the Criminal Justice Information Services Division, told the DCNF in an interview. “That should trigger a referral to the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) for investigation for lying on the forms.”

The investigative report from the DCNF comes two-weeks after the deadly mass shooting at a church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, where 26 people were murdered and dozens more were injured. The gunman purchased the firearms that he used because the military under Obama’s leadership failed to report his criminal and psychiatric records to the FBI. Had they properly reported his record, he would not have been able to obtain firearms.