The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette (which is almost as dumb a name as Post Intelligencer) writes:

More than 7,000 people who should have been barred from buying guns were able to buy them anyway in 2002 and 2003, according to a Justice Department review released Monday.

The government rarely prosecutes such cases, the report said.

Federal law stipulates that gun buyers might have to wait up to three business days before receiving their weapons; under a system of instant FBI background checks instituted in 1998, most sales are approved much quicker. Of the 17 million gun purchases in the past two years, 122,000 were denied because of the checks.

If the background check isn’t completed within the period, however, the law says the purchase must go through. In 2002 and 2003, there were a combined 7,030 “delayed denial” cases in which the FBI found that a prohibited person was able to get a gun after the period expired, according to the review by Glenn Fine, the Justice Department’s inspector general.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives retrieved the weapon in 97 percent of those cases. But that sometimes took a year or longer.

The study did not say how many times a crime was committed with the gun before it was retrieved but provided some examples, including an instance in which a prohibited buyer was charged with aggravated assault after firing the illegally purchased weapon at another person’s car.

Several reasons were cited by the bureau for its failure to retrieve the guns more quickly, including staff shortages, technology problems and lack of adequate timeliness standards. The review also found that agents did not consider it a priority to track down the illegal gun purchasers because they are not viewed as dangerous. “We were also told that ‘bad guys’ generally do not purchase their firearms through legitimate dealers,” the review said.

The study also found that federal prosecutors brought charges in only 154 of the 122,000 illegal purchase cases.

I suppose the three-day rule is to rule out denial of a legal purchase by simply not doing the check. Seems the better solution is to mandate the check be done in three days.

Only 154 charges in 122,000 cases? Maybe if the ATF was more willing to enforce existing gun laws, the calls for more gun laws might not be necessary.

Posted in uncategorized on July 27th, 2004 by SayUncle | RSS 2.0 |