When someone undergoes a NICS check, it's to determine if they're eligible under the law to buy a firearm. I have a problem with the whole process, but it is the law. It's illegal for those who know they're ineligible to try and buy a firearm, too.
However, there are no ramifications for those people doing so. No one does anything.
This is true of felons, but also illegal immigrants.
And now, for a change, a generally anti-gun media outlet is asking whether tracking those denials might be a good thing.
Law enforcement agencies mostly don’t act when electronic messages arrive notifying them that someone in their jurisdiction unsuccessfully tried to buy a gun, even when those missives include important reasons on why they were denied, like an outstanding warrant or a prior felony. Prosecutors, in turn, only get a tiny fraction of potential cases to prosecute. And the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, beleaguered in the past year by one of their prominent crime analysts being charged with more than 100 felonies related to mishandling DNA evidence, acknowledges it has been slow to adopt a way to flag troublesome people attempting to buy firearms the legal way — even though lawmakers entrusted the state agency with the burden last year.
In allegedly planning an anti-Zionist firebombing attack in Boulder that killed one person and injured more than a dozen others, Mohamad Soliman’s attempts last year at buying weapons in many ways exemplifies the strengths and shortcomings of Colorado’s system to prevent people from buying firearms when they’re not legally able to have them.
In November, Soliman tried to purchase guns at a Colorado Springs gun store to carry out his attack, court documents said. In his firearm application, he was flagged as someone without legal status to be in the country, which disqualifies him from buying guns in Colorado.
He left the gun store in Colorado Springs that day without approval for the gun.
Within minutes, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the Colorado Springs Police Department and the El Paso County Sheriff’s Office were told about Soliman via a service called Instacheck, which is, essentially, a half a page of information that states the person’s name, the date they tried to buy a gun and why the purchase was denied.
No law enforcement agency acted on — or even made note of — Soliman’s gun purchase attempt.
Of course, as an illegal immigrant, he was always going to be denied.
The problem, though, is that not everyone who is denied is necessarily breaking the law. They may not know they're prohibited, for one thing. For another, there are a lot of false reports in the NICS system. A lot of people pop up as prohibited even though they've never been convicted of anything. This could be a case of confusion, identity theft, or any number of other issues, but it's not a criminal offense for someone who should be able to buy a gun to be denied.
It's interesting that the media is suddenly interested in actually addressing existing violations of gun laws rather than just pushing new ones, but there are still plenty of issues here, as noted above.
Further, there's nothing that actually stops law enforcement from acting on these reports, so far as I've been able to find. They could at least check it out. Why don't they?
Probably because there are a lot of them, and many aren't actually trying to break the law. This report starts by claiming that 14 people who can't lawfully buy a gun try to each day. That's over 5,000 per year, in a state that has a lot of crimes being carried out and with departments that have limited resources. Someone being stopped from doing something they lawfully couldn't do wouldn't be a high priority for me, either, in most cases.
Plus, this report cites the guy who set pro-Israeli activists on fire as an example of why it would be a good thing, but let's note that we're talking about one person out of those 5,000 per year. Yes, he was a bad man who did an awful thing--and serves as a prime example of how the lack of a gun doesn't stop a bad person from doing awful things--but how many of those denials each year result in such an atrocity?
It might stop some such events, but how many others are there that have happened throughout the nation in the last few years where the perpetrator wouldn't have been caught up in such a thing? Almost none.
Now, ask yourself how many people who did nothing wrong would be bothered by law enforcement over nothing because of an effort like this?
Then you have to ask what the police aren't working on while they look into denials that may have no nefarious intent.
This is something that's largely missing from any and all debate on the topic, and why I can't really make a big thing over enforcing current gun laws more vigorously, especially when the system in place has so many issues as it is.
But if the media is starting to recognize that gun control doesn't actually stop bad people, that might be a positive move forward, so long as it continues in a rational direction.
I'm just not holding my breath on that.
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