Senate's new background checks gun bill simply enforces current law

Ten years ago, after a mass shooting that could have been prevented, Congress passed a bipartisan law to fix the nation’s gun background check system. A decade later, a bipartisan group of senators is introducing new legislation to try to fix it again.

The gun legislation the senators announced this morning would not require a background check on every single gun sale, despite new polling data showing that 95% of Americans – a record high – support these universal background checks.

Instead, the compromise legislation would simply add new accountability measures to make sure that states and federal agencies are entering the proper records into the background check system.

For years, the federal database that is supposed to stop dangerous people from buying guns has been undermined by missing records. At least three of America’s most high-profile mass shooters were legally barred from buying guns, but were able to purchase them anyway because of the federal system’s failures. Among them was the gunman who murdered 26 people in a Texas church this month.

Early reports from the mass shooting in northern California on Tuesday, which left five dead and included an attack on an elementary school, also suggested the shooter had been barred from owning firearms by a court order.

Federal agencies, including the military, are already required by law to submit records to the gun background checks system, under a 2008 measure passed in the wake of the Virginia Tech University shooting a decade ago, which left 32 people dead. But the air force announced after the Texas shooting that it had failed to submit the record of the Sutherland Springs church shooter’s 2012 domestic violence conviction to the background check system, allowing him to legally purchase multiple firearms in the years that followed.

It’s not yet clear how widespread the failure to submit military domestic violence convictions may have been. Officials for the Department of Defense and the air force have announced they are investigating the issue.

“For years agencies and states haven’t complied with the law, failing to upload these critical records without consequence,” Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican co-sponsoring the bill said in a statement on Thursday. “This bill aims to help fix what’s become a nationwide, systemic problem so we can better prevent criminals and domestic abusers from obtaining firearms.” Cornyn has an A+ rating from the National Rifle Association, the country’s most powerful gun-rights group.

The new legislation requires states and federal agencies to release public “implementation plans” describing how they ensure that “all information” is entered into the system and adds increased requirements for public scrutiny of how many records federal agencies are contributing to the background check system.

The law has both carrots and sticks to improve record-keeping, including grant incentives to help update the database and the threat of “prohibiting bonus pay for political appointees” if federal agencies fail to upload the right records.

A Democratic co-sponsor on the bill conceded that the legislation was only a small step forward. “It’s no secret that I believe much more needs to be done. But this bill will make sure that thousands of dangerous people are prevented from buying guns,” said Chris Murphy, a Democrat whose gun control advocacy has been shaped by the 2012 elementary school shooting in Newtown, Connecticut.

Murphy, who led a 15-hour filibuster on the Senate floor last year in the wake of the mass shooting at an LGBT nightclub in Orlando, Florida, has been eager to achieve bipartisan progress on guns, one of Washington’s most intractable issues. “Big news: super close to a bipartisan breakthrough on gun legislation,” he tweeted on Wednesday, in advance of the new legislation’s announcement.

Murphy praised Cornyn’s work on the bill and said the legislation “provides the foundation for more compromise in the future”.

Gun violence prevention advocates said that new legislation was needed to ensure compliance with the current system, and that even if the new legislation passed, many loopholes would still remain in the law.

“The failures are so stark here, and the danger to the public is so stark, so I think there’s clearly a need for some dramatic action,” said Lindsay Nichols, the federal policy director at the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. Given its past track record, expecting the military to follow the law on its own was not a sufficient response, she said. “I don’t think we can expect that to really happen without a legal requirement.”

Nicols said it’s not clear how many other gun murders might have been stopped if the military’s background check reporting had been fixed earlier.

“If the air force failed to report somebody, and instead of resulting in the deaths of 26 people in a church, it resulted in the death of one person on the streets of Chicago, it probably would not have sparked the same national conversation,” she said. “I don’t know if we’d even know about it.”

For years, Republicans in Congress have blocked any attempt to pass new gun control laws, despite a series of increasingly deadly, high-profile mass shootings. But they have shown willingness to try to force compliance, once again, with current law.

In 2007, after a mass shooting at Virginia Tech University left 32 people dead, Congress passed a new law that attempted to close gaping holes in the background check system. The Virginia Tech perpetrator, a senior at the university, had been able to buy a gun because the mental health record that would have disqualified him from gun ownership had not been entered into the system. The bipartisan law, signed by George W Bush, offered financial incentives to help states to put their disqualifying mental health records into the background check system, so the error that left dozens of Americans dead would not be repeated again.

A decade later, mental health record reporting has improved, but it’s still far from complete. National Rifle Association-approved compromises inserted into the legislation to allow people with past mental health records to restore their gun rights have undermined the effort, a 2013 ProPublica investigation found.

Gun violence prevention advocates said far more action was needed, including new definitions of an expansion of the background check law. Under current federal law, only licensed gun dealers have to check potential buyers in the background check database, meaning that private citizens in most states are free to buy and sell guns from each other without any background check.

Other changes to the background check process might also improve safety. In 2015, a white supremacist who went on to murder nine people in a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina, was able to buy a gun because a background check investigator juggling multiple cases could not immediately locate the arrest record that contained the admission that he had used illegal drugs. Because current law allows gun stores to sell a firearm if an investigation into the status of the buyer goes on for more than three days, the stalled investigation meant that the shooter was allowed to legally purchase a gun.

The Charleston shooting “could have been prevented if there were more time for the background check system to work”, Nichols said. But changing the law to allow for more than three days to block a gun sale is “not part of the conversation, and it would be good if it were”.

America’s debate over gun control has remained deadlocked since the 2012 Sandy Hook elementary school massacre in Newtown, Connecticut, when a gunman killed his mother and claimed the lives of 20 children and six educators before taking his own.

The shooting prompted the US Senate to debate legislation in April 2013 that would have expanded background checks, but the bill failed to clear even a procedural vote with all but four Republicans voting against it. Four Democrats also joined Republicans in killing the measure, delivering a blow to gun control advocates and Barack Obama, who made the strengthening of gun laws a foremost priority of his second term.

The Sandy Hook tragedy, and subsequent inaction, was also personal for Murphy, who was then closing out his term as the congressman whose district included Newtown. Since his arrival in the Senate in 2013, the senator has ranked among the leading advocates of stricter gun laws.

But even as a series of deadly shootings have come to pass, gun-related legislation has been stymied on Capitol Hill amid steep opposition from Republicans and the National Rifle Association.

In addition to the failed vote on background checks in 2013, the Senate twice rejected proposals to prevent suspected terrorists from purchasing firearms.

The latter votes followed both the Orlando massacre in June 2016, which left 49 dead and 58 others wounded, and the December 2015 mass shooting in San Bernardino, California, in which 14 people were killed and 22 more were injured at an office holiday party. In both incidents, the perpetrators claimed to be inspired by Islamic State.