According to a new report from Roll Call, the FBI may have failed to complete “hundreds of thousands” of criminal background checks for potential gun buyers, leaving a loophole through which unqualified individuals may have been able to obtain guns.
The incomplete reports are all reports that involved enough investigation that they weren’t completed within 88 days as required by Federal regulations.
“Roll Call obtained previously unpublished data, which is not included in the FBI’s annual public report on gun background checks, that showed the FBI has left hundreds of thousands of gun background checks unfinished for years, despite an internal 2015 report that flagged the problem and suggested solutions,” The Week reported Tuesday. “The incomplete checks result from an 88-day deadline after which the FBI must purge the checks from its computers, even if they aren’t done. Last year, for example, the agency processed 8.2 million checks, but 201,323 were purged.”
Theoretically, this means that someone could have purchased a gun legally after the three-day waiting period as required by law — and after passing the basic FBI background check — but should ultimately have been denied a weapon because something odd turned up upon a further, more extensive investigation into their criminal or personal history. In those cases, typically the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms retrieves the gun.
In these cases, though, the FBI background checks simply fell off the radar, so there was no resolution and no follow up. In at least one case — the case of a mass shooter who killed worshippers at a black church in South Carolina in 2015 — a record that fell off the radar indirectly led to a multiple homicide.
Bearing Arms, which covers gun news, points out that the number of “failed” 88-day background checks is actually pretty miniscule compared to the number of completed ones, meaning that that the “loophole” left by the oversight would be a relatively small one. And it would be difficult for any barred individual to “plan” to use the loophole, since most individuals who can’t buy a gun either wouldn’t pass the three-day background investigation, or couldn’t safely assume the FBI would miss the red flags on their record over the course of the 88-day deeper investigation.
It’s also a tough “loophole” to close: “there’s not likely to be any change to the rule that requires records to be purged after 88 days. Those records have to be purged. Failure to do so would constitute a bigger problem than the possibility that a felon might have purchased a gun at a gun store. Without that purge, what you’d have is the FBI sitting there with a type of gun registry. That’s illegal at the federal level and should be illegal at all levels of the government.”
The Brady organization, which pushes for gun control measures, seems to think such a lapse on the part of the FBI is an argument for stricker gun control laws, longer waiting periods, and, perhaps, even a registry like the one Bearing Arms says might be created by “closing” this “loophole,” but the more likely argument here is that the existing schematic for deciding who gets a gun is so flawed that futher gun control laws wouldn’t do much to improve the situation.