Garbage in, garbage out: Gun checks miss millions of fugitives

The Gannett Company is reporting that millions of fugitives can pass undetected through federal background checks and buy guns illegally because police departments across the country routinely fail to put their names into a national database that tracks people on the run from the law.

From the article:

Those background checks, conducted by the FBI, are designed to block fugitives, felons and others who might be violent from buying firearms. They automatically bar sales to anyone identified in federal records as having an outstanding arrest warrant, even if it is for a minor crime.

Yet despite years of attempts to shore up the government’s National Instant Background Check System, enormous gaps remain, particularly when it comes to identifying fugitives. In five states alone, law enforcement agencies failed to provide information to the FBI about at least 2.5 million outstanding arrest warrants, police and court records show. Among them are tens of thousands of people wanted for violent offenses and other felonies.

Herein lies the problem for anti-gun rights extremists' claims that a so-called "universal" background check (gun registration) scheme will prevent crime. Because the database is flawed - because it lacks many mental health records, files on criminal history, etc. etc. - there is nothing close to "universal" about a background check.

Again, from the article:

Michigan police are required to report every arrest warrant to the state police, but they share only about 7 percent with the FBI — a process that would require little more than checking two boxes in the state’s computer system. The result is that the federal databases used to conduct background checks are missing more than 900,000 Michigan arrest warrants. That means a fugitive from Michigan could walk into a gun store anywhere in the country, agree to a background check and walk out with a gun and neither the FBI nor the store would have any way to know he was wanted.

The gaps are largely a byproduct of the fact that police and prosecutors are often unwilling to spend the time or money to pursue fugitives across a state border. The FBI fugitive database is built to help police find people once they leave the state, and many agencies see no reason to include the names of fugitives they have no intention of pursuing.

An investigation last month by USA Today found that tens of thousands of fugitives — including people on the run from charges of robbery, sexual assault and murder — could escape justice merely by crossing a state border. Those fugitives are responsible for a substantial share of violent crime. In Washington, for example, one of every six people charged with murder was already wanted by the police for another crime.

Given these findings, one might think that the anti-gun rights brigade would back down from their claims that background checks are the answer to everything from accidental shootings to active killers. But alas, that is not the case.

After a gunman killed 32 people at Virginia Tech in 2007, states rushed to pour more information into the databases the FBI uses to conduct its background checks, especially records that could help identify people diagnosed with mental illnesses. Gaps in fugitive reporting went largely unaddressed.

“It is unfortunately not surprising to me the extent to which there are holes in our system, given Congress’ lack of success in addressing them,” said Dan Gross, president of the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

Got that? Despite the fact that the database against which background checks are conducted is largely junk, Mr. Gross still believes that if Congress had passed so-called "universal" background checks, the problem enumerated in this article would somehow be rectified. But of course it would not.

In Little Rock, Deandra Smith, already facing charges of shooting into a crowded nightclub, managed to buy at least four guns from a local pawn shop because a warrant for his arrest had never been reported to state or federal fugitive databases. “Without that, it wouldn’t matter how many checks you ran,” his lawyer, David Cannon, said.

...The gaps add up to a “massive, but not well-documented, warrant under-reporting problem,” researchers for Search, a non-profit that helps states share criminal records, concluded last year. They estimated as many as 6 million arrest warrants may be missing from FBI records.

The bottom line is this: there is no reason to even begin a discussion on "universal" background checks until officials can confirm that the databases being checked against are complete and up to date. But they are clearly not anywhere even close to that mark. As it stands now, officials could run a background check against Jeffrey Dahmer, and if his information had never been included in the database against which the check is being run, he would pass with flying colors.

Garbage in, garbage out.

Chad D. Baus is the Buckeye Firearms Association Secretary, BFA PAC Vice Chairman, and an NRA-certified firearms instructor.