While the Brady Law has displayed a successful increase in the prevention of illegal selling of these guns, the issue still remains of gun shows that make background checks difficult to instill and overall render the checks useless. The law has displayed great prosperity after its enactment and produced more than enough substantial evidence supporting the urgent need for continued reform. Since February 28, 1994, the Brady law has blocked more than 2.1 million gun purchases, or 343 purchases blocked every day, according to data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics. More than one million of those attempted purchases were by felons, another 291,000 denials were to domestic abusers, and 118,000 of them were gun sales to fugitives.
All of these blocked sales can be credited to the use of the background checks. Disregarding the complaints of those pushing the notion that the bill wasn’t 100% effective, the numbers do not lie and at the end of the day still suggest that without this legislation the number of fatalities from guns could be more than it already is. In spite of all this bill has achieved, a loophole still remains that allows gun show sellers to disregard the background checks threatening everything that’s been accomplished. In 1998, over 4,400 gun shows were conducted around the country and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) estimates on average 2,500 – 5,000 gun shows are held annually. In general, between 25% to 50% of the sellers present at such shows are not licensed dealers (The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence). The gun show loophole makes it very easy for guns to fall into the hands of prohibited individuals, including criminals, juveniles and those with significant mental disorders.
Closing this loophole would not only protect the country’s citizens from becoming victims of gun violence by prohibited individuals but it would also create a barrier between the legal and illegal markets for guns. Not to mention, it is much more difficult for law enforcement to trace firearms sold on the secondary (illegal) market to those utilizing the weaponry for crimes. These second-hand firearms usually have left the possession of a licensed dealer with detailed records and reached the hands of an unlicensed seller, who is not held to the same requirement to keep such records or run the names of potential buyers through a background check (The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence). The loophole allows for a complete bypass of the important restrictions put into place by the Brady Bill and brings into perspective how many guns on this market are undocumented. Until this loophole is properly dealt with, the death toll as a result of these products will only grow and also leave the question of how many of the innocent lives lost could have been protected had the shooter bought off the gun show market and never faced a background check.
127 our experts are availableright now
This law, while accomplishing great strides in the fight to create a safer America, has still more to be improved upon, starting off with the adjustments needed to account for the gun show loophole. A possible approach to combat the illegal purchasing and selling of guns was proposed in the King-Thompson Law (Public Safety and Second Amendment Rights Protection Act of 2017). The goal of this legislation was to protect Second Amendment rights, but ensured that all individuals who would be prohibited from buying a firearm were listed in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, and all purchasers put through a responsible and consistent background check process ( www.GovTrack.us.).
Though it may seem similar to the Brady Bill, this suggested legislation took gun control reform a step further by attempting to cover the basis of gun shows as well as increasing the time period between initial inquiry of a gun to the actual selling. The act was in response to the concept of a supplier selling from his or her private collection and since the primary objective was not to make a profit, the seller is not “engaged in the business” and is therefore not required to have a license. In this situation, the sellers are not forced to keep records of the sales and are also not mandated to perform proper background checks on potential buyers, even those prohibited from purchasing guns by the first part of the Gun Control Act (The Coalition to Stop Gun Violence).
The illegal market clearly thrives off this being that as many as 40% of all gun sales are undocumented private party gun sales that succeed due to the lack of requirement to complete a background check also known as the “gun show loophole.” While this eventually failed in the Congressional voting process, some bills have found more success and enhanced the Brady Bill. The Gun Control Act of 1968, for example, requires anyone engaged in the business of selling guns to have a Federal Firearms License (FFL) and keep a record of their sales. By doing this process, authorities are able to better monitor the sellers of the gun industry and trace the purchasing trail left behind for guns in question of investigations. The Gun Control Act was in fact a considerable addition to the gun reform process but it still lacked in the area of tackling the issue of the loopholes.
On the other hand, the King-Thompson Bill had the potential to defeat the challenge of gun shows but failed to pass. According to a March 10, 2016 Lancet study, implementing universal background checks on the federal level could possibly reduce firearm deaths by a calculated 56.9%; background checks for any ammunition sales could decrease casualties by a projected 80.7%; and gun identification requirements could lower deaths by an estimated 82.5%. If all three of the previously mentioned implementations were real, the possibility of a safer America would be that much closer to a reality. The continued refusal to address the insufficient measures established in the Brady Bill displays the need for change in Congress and signals the necessity to introduce more legislation since the current bills we have, though decent, are still unable to make a significant effect on the growing number of mass shootings and deaths across the United States.
Gun control laws are just as old or older than the Second Amendment, ratified in 1791, and were initially founded in a time of a completely different mentality and technology. Some of these laws regulating gun usage appeared throughout colonial times in America in the form of criminalizing the transfer of guns to slaves, indentured servants, Catholics, and Native Americans. Though the basis of these blocked purchasers is outdated, it still showed an initiative taken to put restrictions on the gun trade. In addition, the laws limited the amount of gunpowder allowed to be stored in homes, banned loaded guns in houses in the Boston region, and required the participation in meetings of troops to then conduct door-to-door surveys about which guns were owned in each household.
Though gun reform remained evident in the history of the United States, Supreme Court rulings also provided key precedents in the rules dictating ownership and the usage of firearms. In the June 26, 2008 District of Columbia et al. v. Heller U.S. Supreme Court decision, the justice at the time, Antonin Scalia, wrote, ‘Like most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited… nothing in our opinion should be taken to cast doubt on longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms’ (District of Columbia v. Heller).
This statement reinforced the insufficient use of the Second Amendment as grounds to carry guns on banned areas by prohibited people. Scalia’s words proved potent as others joined in to support the concept that the rights were not in fact unlimited and didn’t ensure total immunity on all issues relating to gun rights. This statement became a basis in which the court system would mainly follow in reference to those arguing the irrefutable rights supposedly guaranteed by the Second Amendment. The claims that Scalia made would be seen again through other cases such as the June 9, 2016 ruling where the US Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals voted 7-4 that ‘the right of the general public to carry a concealed firearm in public is not, and never has been, protected by the Second Amendment,’ thus maintaining the law mandating a permitting process and ‘good cause’ needed for those trying to obtain concealed carry licenses in the state of California. Limitations on guns and their owners have appeared all throughout our nation’s timeline so the concept isn’t unheard of, but the recent death toll linked to unrestrained usage of these firearms indicates that new laws are needed. Among these new laws is the Brady Handgun Prevention Act which still could use improvement in order to fully address prominent issues in the original document.
As a topic of debate for the last century or so, gun violence has brought out two very different sides but at the end of the day the issue still remains; there must be something done to prevent the mass deaths across the nation every year. With the massacre rates increasing annually it is hard to ignore the reality of the world in which we live where a school or public place being shot up is not entirely shocking. The pro-gun supporters in the country express their concerns about gun legislation as violating their second amendment when the argument itself is often invalid all together. The “arms” that the amendment was made to protect were not anywhere near as deadly as the ones we have in this current day and age.
With products offered in this gun market to increase the rate at which rounds are firing off making them significantly more deadly, there just isn’t a valid backing. The fatality of these sorts of weapons in crimes jumps since the several minute process of reloading guns back in the 1700s is essentially nonexistent today. The founding fathers, in making this Amendment in the constitution, had no way of imagining a world in which someone would walk into a school with an AR-15 and be able to massacre innocent children over the course of several minutes without skipping a beat. A question often asked is if the firearms that the constitution originally protected were used today, the ability to interfere and in some cases take a mass shooter down would be much easier with the forced breaks from reloading ammunition and the idea of how many lives could have been saved still remains relevant. This brings to light the failed argument that gun reform is unconstitutional since it is a rule of history to adapt based on the present day and age and not use outdated logic to back decisions.
On the other hand, the complete outlawing of guns would not solve the issue presented as it transfers the market into a fully illegal one that would grow in size and power with the priority placed upon it. Not to mention, the banning of guns does not eliminate them from the world but rather gives a necessity to illegal suppliers and only fuels the underground market used in selling processes. Gun reform is often associated by certain people with government attempting to “take the guns away” from civilians when in reality it really is not. It is an attempt to reduce the number of people that die as a result of gun violence all over America yearly. With these arguments of both sides taken into consideration, the facts still remain that America has an unmatched record of mass shootings and fatalities as a result of gun violence. With one of the most recent of these devastating tragedies being the Las Vegas shooting, the reality that the gun used was customized to hold more ammunition brings to light that those avoiding the background check can cause legitimate damage.
In fact, a Mother Jones investigation found that in at least 50% of the 62 mass shootings between the years 1982 and 2012, high-capacity magazines were used. When these specific magazines were used in the mass shootings, the death rate rose by sixty-three percent and the injury rate at this situations also rose 156%. It is quite clear that the adjustments we allow for firearms does more damage as it increases the deadliness of the weapon in criminal situations.The Brady Handgun Prevention Act has become the very foundation in which this nation must build off of as no legislation will be perfect entirely on it’s own. At the end of the day, a change is necessary and it requires real consideration from all parties but it is a means to end the issue of the United States maintaining one of the highest numbers of deaths as a result of gun violence in the world. But in order to combat the influx of mass shootings, laws that cover all the basis in which firearms are being sold, that such as gun shows, must be implemented and pressuring congress into introducing more legislation that will be the only way to make a real change in America.
