WASHINGTON – The gun reform legislation Congress passed after two mass shootings by teenagers last year has begun to block some firearms sales to people under the age of 21.
So far, stricter background checks for younger gun buyers have yielded 64 denied the transaction, an FBI spokesperson told HuffPost on Wednesday.
The Bipartisan Safe Communities Act, signed by President Joe Biden in June, expanded criminal background checks for sales at licensed gun dealers to include juvenile records searches for prospective buyers ages 18 to 20.
The new law requires the FBI’s National Criminal Background Check System to search for potentially disqualifying information in local law enforcement agencies, state criminal juvenile justice repositories, and state mental health record custodians. Previously, the system generally only looked at adult court records.
In the expanded check they phase in with only one state agencies in October and the national rollout on January 3. Since the enactment of the law, the system has rejected 425 transactions involving buyers aged 18 to 20, the FBI said, with 64 of those directly. the results of the new law juvenile background check. It is possible that firearms dealers decline additional transactions and some sales go through without a timely response from the system.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), one of the main authors of the law, said a Justice Department official told him during a congressional visit in early January to a background check facility in Clarksburg, West Virginia, that the new policy has blocked 27 firearms. sales to people under 21.
“They’re starting to actually deny gun purchases based on a teenager’s mental health and criminal record,” Cornyn told HuffPost. “This is just the beginning, and hopefully when the bill is enacted it will have a greater impact.”
There is no doubt 64 rejected transactions represent a small impact, given the overall volume of gun purchases. People with felony criminal records or restraining orders have long been barred from gun ownership, and in 2021, the most recent year for which data is available, the national background check system ran nearly 10 million checks, turning down more than 153,000 transactions, according to The FBI’s latest report.
But the blocked sales represent a significant political shift after decades of Congressional inaction on rising gun violence, which in 2020 leading cause of death in children in the United States. Some kids have it now personally experienced several mass shootings in his short life, including Jackie Matthews, a senior at Michigan State University now for the Sandy Hook massacre of 2012 and Another mass shooting on her campus this week.
Peter Ambler, director of the gun control group Giffords: Courage to War Gun Violence, said the fact that the new law has prevented a few dozen under-21 gun sales shows there is plenty of opportunity for Congress to make people safer from gun violence.
“Even the most cursory of investigations and checks will find people whose history shows that they are irresponsible to any community that allows them to buy or carry guns,” Ambler said in an interview.
Sen. Chris Murphy (Conn.), one of the Democrats who helped write the legislation, said it is likely that local police contacts have garnered the most helpful information for the FBI.
“It’s a big and undiscovered story, the fact that it’s been enforced and it’s stopped people from getting guns,” Murphy said.
Back-to-back mass killings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, by teenage gunmen using legally purchased assault rifles, prompted lawmakers to act last year. Democrats talked about an outright ban on gun sales to people under 21 – after all, Congress recently increase the age requirement for the sale of cigarettes to 21 — but Republicans won’t hear it.
Final negotiations include expanded background checks, grants for states to enact “red flag” laws, extra funding for mental health services, and a temporary ban on gun ownership for violent dating partners.
But even though the law expanded background checks for gun buyers at 21, lawmakers did not close the massive loophole exempting the sale of firearms from background checks if the seller is not a licensed dealer of firearms. In other words, if a background check prevents a teenager from buying a gun from a licensed dealer, they can still buy a gun at a gun show. or from strangers on Facebook without going through a background check. Not only are there no background checks, there are no federal age restrictions on private gun sales.
The October shooting illustrates how the loophole works. The police said background check prevents 19-year-old from buying assault rifle from licensed dealer in Missouri – potentially an example of the new law expanded background checks in action.
But all the teenager had to do was go to a private seller who had bought the assault rifle from a licensed dealer two years earlier. A 19-year-old man brought a gun to a high school, where he killed two people and wounded seven others before police arrived and shot him dead.