Should ID Checks Be Required for Gun Sales?

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The Brady Background Check system is nothing more than a feel-good measure that deludes Americans into thinking their elected officials are doing “something” to fight crime.

But the real record shows that background checks have NOT reduced murder and crime rates.

First, one of the nation’s leading anti-gun medical publications, the Journal of the American Medical Association, found that the Brady registration law has failed to reduce murder rates. In its August 2, 2000 issue, JAMA reported that states implementing waiting periods and background checks did “not [experience] reductions in homicide rates or overall suicide rates.”

Second, the General Accounting Office found in 2001 that (surprise!) people can easily use bogus identification to purchase firearms. In every state where the GAO tried, undercover agents were able to buy guns with fake IDs 100% of the time. The logical conclusion, of course, is that Brady background checks are NOT stopping criminals from using such bogus documentation to buy firearms.

Third, gun buyers who are denied in a store can still buy an illegal gun elsewhere. A well-known example occurred almost a decade ago when Benjamin Smith left the Illinois gun store where he was refused a firearm, bought guns on the street, and then murdered two people less than a week later.

Gun control advocates like to focus on the number of people who were denied the ability to buy a firearm. But since many of these people never go to jail, they remain just as free as Benjamin Smith to buy an illegal gun.  

And then there’s the fact that many of these “denials” are just flat-out fiction.

In one study, the Indianapolis Star and News reported that the U.S. Department of Justice had overstated the number of people who were denied firearms in Indiana alone by more than 1,300%. Indiana was not an aberration, as the newspaper reported on June 23, 1998, that “paperwork errors and duplications inflated the [DOJ’s] numbers” in many states.  

Another study (conducted by the GAO in 1996) found that over 50% of denials under the Brady Law were for administrative snafus, traffic violations, or reasons other than felony convictions.

Bottom line? Brady background checks have not delivered the safety promised by their backers.