Gun cure is: Apply the law

Wednesday, June 11, 2008 8:56 PM CDT

Apply the law instead of formulating new ones, gun control opponents have always cried. It turns out that in one case they have a valid point. All we have to do, says a new study from the Medical College of Wisconsin, is apply our background check law thoroughly to reduce firearm deaths.

Whenever a firearm is sold, gun dealers contact the law enforcement agency designated by each state to conduct background checks. At minimum, that agency has to query a federal database to search for people who have been convicted of offenses punishable by more than one year in prison, who are fugitives, who have been convicted of domestic violence or are subject to restraining orders, or who have been adjudicated mentally defective, among other criteria. About 1.6 percent of all gun purchase applicants are rejected by this method. However, that federal database doesn’t contain all information available, nor is it necessarily up to date, researchers found.

When gun sale background checks include local law enforcement agencies, they wrote, the firearm suicide rate is 27 percent lower, and the firearm homicide rate is 21 percent lower. That makes intuitive sense. Information tends to percolate up to the federal government from the local level, meaning it is the locals who have the best understanding of their area populations and the most current information.

Wisconsin is one of the states which doesn’t require local checks, nor does it require rigorous examinations for firearms sold at gun shows.

States could make extra efforts to make sure that local records are shared with federal databases, the researchers wrote, or could require that background checks be required on the local level. We should pursue both steps, but we should do the second one first because computer information sharing can be problematic. Think about how hard it is for even trained support technicians to get computers to talk to each other, then multiply that by the thousands of law enforcement agencies and court systems across the country. Federal databases would still be behind. Yet given the mobility of our population, especially elements of the criminal population, we should share information among local and federal governments as much as possible.

In the meantime, there would be a clerk who could quickly query local records by typing identification into a computer. It would be a small step and an inexpensive way to preserve about one-quarter of the husbands, mothers, sons, fathers, daughters, aunts, and others who fall to firearms use.

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