Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [111]
A more significant but little-known portion of the crime bill substantially tightened regulations governing firearms dealers, requiring that license applicants be photographed and fingerprinted and that the dealers comply with all state and local laws governing firearms dealerships, including zoning regulations. The law also dictated that ATF must provide to local law-enforcement agencies lists of firearms dealers in their territories. These requirements alone will begin to reduce the ranks of that vast army of “kitchen table” dealers who supply so many guns to America’s crooks.
In May 1994, President Clinton used his executive powers to halt the import of Chinese SKS rifles, ancestors of the AK-47 and once the standard infantry rifles of the Chinese, North Vietnamese, and Soviet armies. Chinese exporters, some with direct connections to the Chinese military, pumped the rifle into this country at such high volume that throughout much of 1993 a shopper could buy one for well under $100. As a consequence of its low price and its ready availability under regulations governing the sales of long rifles, the SKS became the only rifle to make ATF’s 1993 and first-quarter 1994 lists of the top ten weapons most commonly traced by America’s law-enforcement agencies. It was an SKS that Wayne Lo used in his massacre at Simon’s Rock College in Massachusetts.
The most important legislative advance toward public safety, however, was the activation of the Brady law early in 1994. News reporters, forced by space constraints to describe the bill in journalistic shorthand, managed to create the widespread impression that it merely established a five-day waiting period. In fact, the bill took a revolutionary step down the road to rationality.
Prior to the Brady law, a fundamental paradox governed firearms regulation. Everyone in America, even the most zealous NRA fundamentalist, has long agreed that certain people—felons, fugitives, and so forth—should not be allowed to buy guns. Yet Congress, until it passed the Brady law in 1993, never took the necessary next step of establishing a practical means of eliminating those very people from the marketplace. Society’s only brake on the wholesale distribution of firearms to killers and robbers was the rather flimsy form 4473, which, as I showed on this page–this page, asked illegitimate buyers to disqualify themselves at the point of purchase and stayed in dealers’ files unvetted by anyone.
Brady’s major accomplishment was to establish for the first time in American history a uniform minimum background check on all handgun purchasers and thus take the responsibility for screening buyers from the hands of America’s gun dealers. Brady exempted states such as Maryland, California, and Florida, which already had some form of background-check system. But elsewhere, where sales of handguns hitherto had been virtually unregulated, prospective buyers now had to wait five days while local law-enforcement officials conducted a background check.
Such checks constitute a powerful limit on distribution of firearms to the wrong people. In 1991, Florida began an instant background-check program. The process takes an average of three and a half minutes, but in 1993 alone the program unconditionally barred 7,534 purchases of firearms by known crooks. It blocked another 13,274 purchases attempted by persons who had been arrested for “dangerous crimes” but whose cases had not yet been fully adjudicated. The program also intercepted 854 purchases attempted by buyers wanted under felony and misdemeanor warrants.
The fact that so many felons, fugitives, and other dangerous souls still try to buy guns from licensed dealers, despite such checking networks, indicates the extent to which they had become accustomed to the easy access afforded in the past by form 4473. Old habits, apparently, die hard.
A couple of vast gaps still remain in America’s system of firearms regulation.