Nearly 150 CEOs send letter to Congress urging action on gun violence

Right, well… we all know there isn’t a problem in this world that a strongly worded letter can’t solve.

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You’ll have to link me to the article you’re talking about. You’re right the current system has an up to 3 day hold, in which case they have to approve or reject - there isn’t a third option to delay further. I don’t see how a check at a gun show or a check in a store would be more or less likely to have a delay. Most checks happen in a few minutes. A side note, around 80,000/yr get rejected, but the number of followups about a prohibited person attempting to buy a gun leads to literally a handful of prosecutions per year.

You’re right there are limitations, or rather, inefficiencies and systematic errors with NICS. The reporting isn’t as current as it should be. The processes for reporting isn’t as standardized or consistent as it should be. There isn’t a lot of oversight that state and local governments are reporting to NICS, and the system it self (computers, software, etc) shows it’s age.

So all of those things could and should be fixed. Trump did make an order to bolster NICS, but I don’t know how that has translated into real world action.

One would think making the current system the best it could be would be an obvious and relatively easy first step.

https://www.cnn.com/2019/09/09/opinions/congress-stop-gun-violence-andrew-mccabe/index.html

How often does this happen? FBI reports for 2018 reveal that in 4,240 transactions the purchaser was determined to be prohibited only after the three-day deadline expired. Each of these was referred to the ATF for a “firearm retrieval.” The ATF confirmed that the legally prohibited person walked out the door with a new gun in 3,960 of these cases. Information on the number of those weapons that were retrieved by the ATF was not available.

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Thanks for the link!

So the article doesn’t discern where it was bought - store or gun show. Clearly it had to be from an FFL dealer who would do the check. The buyer would come back and be able to purchase a firearm even if the NICS hadn’t returned a approval/rejection after 3-days. In fact I’d guess nearly all of them were at stores, because gun shows usually are on the weekend. Though they may have started the transaction there and it ended at the store later.

So clearly there is room for improvement. It is 2019, not the 30s where people need to sift through massive file cabinets for files. It should be streamlined and clear, and changes in status be reflected in the system quickly.

Though to be fair to the FBI, ~4200 out of ~8.2 million transactions is a .0514% error rate, which isn’t too bad. But still, it could be better for sure.

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No, that snippet was my own addition, from a different article I read a while ago that fugitives don’t go to stores for guns (surveillance cameras abound), but rather gun shows. And a surprising number just walk away with their purchases when the NICS time out. Good luck tracking them down - they are already fugitives!

I’d say it’s pretty damn awful, because one of them was Dylan Roof. :rage: And it’s not an error rate, it’s a “meh, the clock ran out” rate.

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According to the article below, his NICS check didn’t time out, it was that his drug offense wasn’t entered properly and thus not in the NICS database to flag the purchase. Something similar happened to the church shooter in Texas who should have been flagged due to domestic abuse when he was in the military.

These and other examples show how the system is fallible and a solid process to make sure city, county, and state offenses make it into the federal database needs to be worked out. One would think this would help make sure no NICS request ever “times out” as well. If it worked like it was supposed to, we wouldn’t have this problem.

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From the McCabe article on CNN:

Stress and pressure lead to mistakes. We know this from past tragedies: if NICS had more time to sort through the clerical confusion in the Dylann Roof case, the transaction that ultimately placed the gun in the killer’s hands may have been denied.

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The is just “gun washing,” which is sort of like “green washing” only with more blood, suffering, and death from which to make money.

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That’s a nice letter, but how many of the signatories will donate to Democrats in this election cycle instead of to Republicans? That’s where the rubber meets the road.

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The sky is falling, chicken little, DO SOMETHING! We voted for you, DO SOMETHING! The laws we have didnt work, DO SOMETHING!

obama-what-crazy

Yes, we have pretty much weekly mass shootings at this point, sometimes multiple ones in the same week, sometimes more than one on the same day. Something needs to be done. I don’t see how that’s something to mock. We elect people to do their damn jobs, which includes writing legislation for large scale problems that impact all of us. This is impacting the lives of thousands of Americans, so YES, they should DO the thing that we voted them into office to do.

[ETA] And actually, when we HAD a ban on assault weapons, it DID work.

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