November 7, 2017, at New York Daily News
By John R. Lott, Jr.
Within hours of the slaughter of 26 people at the church in Sutherland Springs, Texas, Democrats were calling for expanded background checks to cover the private transfers of guns. If they had waited a few hours, they would have learned that such a law wouldn't have stopped the attack in Texas. Nor would it have stopped any of the other mass public shootings since at least 2000.
Sadly, while they keep calling for new additional checks, we have just learned that the Obama administration didn't run the current system particularly well. Devin Kelley, the killer, was convicted of domestic violence in 2012 (assaulting his wife and brutally fracturing his stepson's skull) and he received a "bad conduct" discharge from the military. But the Obama administration failed to enter the conviction into the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS).
Kelley apparently lied about his record on the form that he filled out to buy the gun (the 4473). Had Kelley's information been in the system, he would have been caught illegally trying to buy the gun, and his lying would have gotten him a conviction for perjury. He should have been in prison serving out at least a three-year prison sentence.
Democrats are furious, directing their anger at the Air Force, not the Obama administration that ran things when Kelley was convicted. Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) demanded the Department of Defense and the Department of Justice explain "where, why and how this process failed."
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) insisted on an immediate "audit of all military criminal investigative organizations" and called the failure "absolutely devastating."
This would have been one of the very rare times the system actually caught a bad guy. Typically, the only people the NICS system stops from buying guns are law-abiding individuals who are just confused with criminals.
In 2010, the last year the Bureau of Justice Statistics released a full annual report on the operation NICS system (the Obama administration stopped releasing annual reports after that), there were 72,659 denials, but only 44 federal prosecutions and just 13 convictions.
Of those 13 convictions, only six were for possession of a firearm by a felon. There were an equally small number of state prosecutions. The reason for the big gap between the 72,659 and the 44 federal prosecutions is that these aren't real cases. It is one thing to stop a criminal from buying a gun. It is something entirely different to stop someone because they have a name similar to criminal.
Over time these "false positives" have added up to several million people. The reason for these mistakes is simple: using roughly phonetically similar names and birthdates just doesn't allow for much accuracy.
It is something that is easy to fix, just by requiring that the government use all the information the government collects when gun buyers fill out the 4473 form (e.g., their Social Security numbers and addresses).
I have proposed this fix to Democrats and gun control advocates for 17 years, but they haven't seen any reason to fix the system, saying that it is important to have a wide net to catch people. Yet they would never let employers conduct criminal background checks on employees this way.
But even if the government had properly entered Kelley's name in the system, we need to realize that background checks aren't some magical solution. The reason that there are so few convictions is that few criminals are as stupid as Kelley; they generally don't try buying guns from places that will flag them. Yet criminals still get plenty of guns. Just like people can get drugs from drug gangs, those same gangs provide illegal guns.
We have a background check system for buying drugs; it is called prescriptions and pharmacies. Does anyone think that people can't readily buy illegal drugs? Why do they put so much more faith into background checks for guns?
The real question gun control advocates refuse to address is what you do when the background check system fails to stop these killers from attacking. What is the backup plan? There are limits to what the police can do. There are so many more possible targets than there are police.
And having an officer in uniform guard a target is like putting them there with a neon sign above them that says: "shoot me first."
Instead of the continued push for new regulations that wouldn't have stopped a single one of these mass public shootings, why not fix the system that we already have? The problem isn't just someone like Kelley who gets through the net. The government shouldn't be stopping law-abiding citizens from buying guns for protection.