It’s basic common sense supported by more than 90% of Americans and wholly consistent with the Second Amendment: Anyone buying a firearm needs a background check. That’s what prevents felons and people with domestic violence protective orders and those suffering from serious mental illness from obtaining deadly weapons, and it’s what separates illegal guns, which not even NRA zealots say they want on the streets, from legal guns.
Yet for a quarter century, a glaring loophole has persisted. Despite federal law mandating background checks on all gun sales by licensed dealers, there’s been no such requirement on sales between unlicensed third parties, the type that often occur at gun shows and online. It’s a loophole large enough to drive a truck full of handguns through — one that a number of states have closed, but that others let people exploit every day.
A 2021 investigation by the Mike Bloomberg-funded Everytown for Gun Safety found that nearly 1 in 9 of the guns sold at giant online gun marketplace Armslist wouldn’t pass a federal background check. Just last week, the federal bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives reported that the number of illegally trafficked firearms is on the rise. The White House estimates that more than a fifth of the guns are being bought without a background check.
Hopefully, the era of open defiance may soon come to an end, thanks to the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act signed by President Biden in 2022 — and rules codifying those statutory changes just finalized by the Justice Department. Barring a successful 11th-hour legal challenge, they’ll go into effect in 30 days.
No, closing the loophole won’t make it hard for legitimate buyers to buy guns the right way. The nation is awash in gun dealers; there are nearly 59,000 of them, four times as many as there are McDonald’s.
Nor will it prevent collectors or people who want to get rid of guns they inherited from selling guns on the private market. This is a carefully written, 466-page regulation that is aimed at anyone “engaged in the business” of selling guns at a profit.
There’s no regulation that’ll magically vacuum up the mountains of illegal guns that flood our cities; that requires robust enforcement by the likes of the NYPD, which seizes thousands of such guns a year.
But federal laws that make it harder for people to obtain illegal weapons in the first place can make it a little easier on cops who walk the streets never knowing whether a person they encounter might be armed, a task made even more difficult after the Supreme Court’s decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association vs. Bruen, which invalidated New York State’s tough licensing regime.
After mass shootings shocked the nation, Donald Trump talked bigly about brokering a bipartisan compromise on guns — then promptly folded to the far right in the Republican Party, and got nothing done.
Under Biden, Congress managed to pass the most significant gun safety legislation in a generation, and now has followed through on that meaningful victory with a rule change that will mean fewer sales to criminals and unstable people. This, as the number of homicides nationwide is in the midst of a steep, 21% year-over-year decline in 186 American cities.
This is what progress toward a safer nation feels like.
