How Do Gun Background Checks Work

William Gordon, left, helps Steve Wrona equally he looks at guns while visiting the Thou&W Gunworks store in Delray Beach, Fla., on Tuesday, the day President Obama announced executive action on guns. Joe Raedle/Getty Images hide explanation

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William Gordon, left, helps Steve Wrona as he looks at guns while visiting the K&Due west Gunworks store in Delray Beach, Fla., on Tuesday, the twenty-four hour period President Obama appear executive activeness on guns.

Joe Raedle/Getty Images

Here's ane topic Americans tin depository financial institution on hearing most in adjacent week's Land of the Union address: gun command. The reaction to President Obama's appear gun-control measures this calendar week was swift and entirely as expected. Gun-control advocates and many Democrats applauded his efforts; gun-rights groups and many Republicans loudly denounced the orders as executive overreach.

Expanded background checks are primal to the president's proposals. His order doesn't rewrite existing laws, but it would broaden the scope of who is in the gun-selling business. It would crave more gun sellers online and at gun shows to be licensed (and perform checks) amid other things.

"Let me be clear: It's not where you are located only what you lot are doing that determines whether y'all are engaged in the business concern of dealing in firearms," Chaser Full general Loretta Lynch told reporters this calendar week.

Then would those extra checks bring downward America'south high levels of gun deaths? Gun policy experts who spoke to NPR say information technology could, but if so, that information technology would only brand a paring.

Here'southward a expect at the testify:

What research says

Two recent studies provide evidence that groundwork checks can significantly curb gun violence. In i, researchers establish that a 1995 Connecticut law requiring gun buyers to go permits (which themselves required groundwork checks) was associated with a 40 percent pass up in gun homicides and a xv percentage drop in suicides. Similarly, when researchers studied Missouri's 2007 repeal of its permit-to-buy police, they found an associated increase in gun homicides by 23 pct, equally well equally a 16-percent increase in suicides.

Those are some huge results — one expert called the Missouri study "the strongest evidence that background checks actually thing," as The New Republic reported — but as with lots of social-science research, there's some fuzziness as to what the results hateful. I caveat is that these studies aren't about background checks alone. Instead, they're about let-to-purchase laws, under which people had to go to local police force enforcement to get a permit and, therefore, a background cheque.

That difference might have impacted the results, explained Daniel Webster, a co-author on both studies. He said that being forced to get a allow from law enforcement might do more to deter a straw purchaser, for example, than getting a bank check at a nearby store.

Furthermore, he added that because so many factors influence gun violence in different ways, information technology's hard to say how much the furnishings seen in Connecticut and Missouri would as well happen in other states. In addition, a stand up your ground law enacted in Missouri in 2007 may take affected the results.

Still, other academic research points to the laws' effectiveness too. In a 2015 analysis of studies published over the grade of fifteen years, Webster and co-author Garen Wintemute institute that expanding background checks could "have protective effects against lethal violence," and that permit-to-purchase laws in particular help curb murders and suicides.

They also plant that groundwork checks help proceed guns out of the easily of criminals, but that it's less certain whether that in turn leads to less violence.

There'south no perfect consensus on how well background-check laws work. A 2000 study plant that the 1994 Brady Human activity — which instituted not simply background checks simply waiting periods at offset — did not reduce either homicide or suicide rates.

A CDC task strength as well plant in a 2003 review "inconsistent findings" as to whether restricting gun access through background checks works and insufficient show as to whether an array of other gun laws are effective. However, the CDC besides said that its findings didn't mean that gun laws don't work; rather, information technology said information technology needed to study the topic more.

Gun-policy researchers say they want to ameliorate study groundwork checks (too every bit many other policies), only a couple of hurdles stand up in the way. Role of the problem is that good studies on the effectiveness of groundwork checks are pretty rare, according to Webster. One reason is that it's hard to detect good test cases to study.

"In that location'due south not a lot of change or variation [in laws] to report in recent times," he said. "The vast bulk of these laws have been on the books for many, many decades."

Another skilful blamed the federal regime.

"1 of the big issues is that the feds accept not funded adept research in this area," said David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Inquiry Center and an skillful on firearm-related injuries.

He points to federal restrictions, passed in 1996, that said the Centers for Affliction Control could not use its funding to "advocate or promote gun control." That caused the CDC to dorsum away from gun research almost entirely.

Outside organizations could pick upward that slack, Hemenway added, but they have not done then. "The foundations haven't done a good job, because information technology'due south such a controversial surface area," he said. You don't want to go involved. So we know some things, but we don't know as well every bit you would hope, given the enormity of the problem."

What recent shootings tell us

While some scholarly show suggests that background checks reduce law-breaking, seeing evidence in recent mass shootings is tougher. As the New York Times found in a December investigation, the guns used in many recent loftier-profile shootings were purchased legally by people who passed groundwork checks.

Importantly, though, to the extent that groundwork-check laws on the books might have prevented mass shootings, it's impossible to compile similar lists of incidents that would have occurred, were it non for those laws.

One other thing recent shootings say is that the current background-bank check system has some gaping holes in it. For example, FBI Managing director James Comey said in July 2015 that Dylann Roof, who is accused of killing 9 at a South Carolina church concluding year, should non accept passed a background cheque. Considering information almost his admission to a narcotics charge never reached an FBI examiner handling his cheque, as the Washington Post reported, Roof was able to buy his gun.

In addition, some states are doing a poor chore of submitting mental health records to NICS, as Politico'southward Kevin Cirilli writes, assuasive some sick people to obtain guns. Cirilli points to Virginia Tech shooter Seung-Hui Cho, who had a history of mental illness before he killed 32 people in 2007.

As it stands, effectually 1.vi percent of 148 one thousand thousand background checks (that is, more than 2 million) between 1994 and 2012 were denied, co-ordinate to federal statistics.

What the statistics say

One of the most important questions to this word is impossible to answer precisely: how many guns are obtained without background checks? While in that location aren't exact numbers on this, the figure could however be substantial. Using 2004 data, around 18 pct of gun transactions involved private sellers, buyers' family unit members or friends or "other" sources, as the Washington Post'due south Glenn Kessler found last twelvemonth. A bulk of those sources were not licensed dealers (and therefore were not required to bear background checks).

According to the figures cited by Kessler, 7 percent of guns were obtained from gun shows (and many of those sales probably underwent groundwork checks).

But information suggests that gun shows don't directly supply many of the guns used in crimes. Spokespeople from the National Burglarize Association and National Shooting Sports Foundation, a trade group for gun sellers, both also pointed NPR to government data showing that less than i percent of prison inmates in 1997 said they got their guns from gun shows. Meanwhile, well-nigh lxxx pct obtained their guns from friends, family or "street" (illegal) sources.

All of this very well may mean that, equally gun-rights advocates like Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio often point out, criminals volition just obtain guns through some avenue other than stores. That would mean that groundwork checks don't deter those people, and, therefore, that expanding them to more online or private or gun show sales would do piffling.

Just there are other possible conclusions. A recent study of offenders in the Chicago area plant nearly obtained their guns from "personal connections, not from gun stores or past theft." While that report suggested to some that background checks are ineffective, one of the authors, Duke University'due south Philip Cook, disagrees.

"This research demonstrates that current federal and local regulations are having a big event on the availability of guns to criminals in Chicago," he said in a release. "They can't buy their guns from stores, the fashion virtually people do, and are instead largely constrained to making private deals with acquaintances, who may or may not be willing and able to provide what they want."

Lawrence Keane, general counsel for the National Shooting Sports Foundation, told NPR that "the industry has e'er been supportive of the background check organization," though he also said he has doubts about how much adept the new proposals will do. In addition, his group is strongly opposed to making background checks universal.

Researchers Hemenway and Webster both think the president's executive actions could have a modest effect on gun violence. For his function, Hemenway thinks universal background checks would be an constructive showtime step, but what he thinks would be more fruitful in the long term has more to do with innovation than legislative action.

"In the long run, nosotros should be spending a lot of money on figuring out technological fixes," he said. "The easiest one is to make guns meliorate for home protection and much, much less dangerous and less probable to be stolen."