When faced with questions concerning the efficacy of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act (hereafter known as the “Brady Act”) and its resulting background check requirement for purchasing firearms, the anti-rights nuts of America are all too willing to trot out statements like, “1,800,000 attempts at purchasing guns were blocked by the Brady Act, so it obviously works!” And who can really argue with them? No one wants firearms in the hands of criminals (not even us pro-rights activists, contrary to popular propaganda), and no one would be denied a firearm purchase due to a background check unless they were a criminal, so stopping almost 2 million goblins from getting hardware seems like a roaring success.
Except that is not exactly what is transpiring:
The only “evidence” that “screening works” comes from their claim that, in 2008, 1.5 percent of those having a Brady background check were denied from purchasing a gun. What the authors likely are aware of, though they do not tell the readers, is that virtually all these cases represent so-called “false-positives”: In 2006 and 2007 (the latest data years available), a tiny fraction — just 2 percent of those 1.5 percent — involved possible unlawful possession; just 0.2 percent of the 1.5 percent were viewed as prosecutable — 174 cases in 2006 and 122 in 2007. At least a third of the remaining cases didn’t result in convictions. These are the types of errors that an academic journal shouldn’t let in, but if it does, they should fix it. But it is my understanding that the journal has refused to publish a clarification of these numbers.
For the two most-recent years we have data on, false positives constituted 98% of all background check denials when people went to purchase firearms. Ninety-eight frakking percent were denied erroneously. Why? Same name as a felon, mistyped data, misspelled data… just think of all the different ways you can screw up writing, copying, typing, and checking information, in addition to all the ways poorly-maintained and rarely-error-proofed databases can barf their guts, and you can develop some loose idea. And only 10% of those who were legitimately bounced by their background checks were actually prosecutable (which really makes me wonder why the other folks were refused). And of that now-0.003%-of-the-total-checks, at least 40% of their cases ended without convictions.
Only in the demented, reality-challenged, logical-fallacy-addled minds of anti-rights nuts would a 0.002% effectiveness rate be considered a “success”.
So are the background checks implemented by the Brady Act a failure? Of course not. The simple truth is that, on average, criminals are not terribly stupid – they know they will fail the background checks, so they do not bother with gun stores, and they pick up their hardware from their friend down the street, through their family members acting as straw buyers, by stealing them from lawful owners, and so forth. In 1997, four years after the Brady Act was enacted, 80% of criminals’ firearms were procured at places other than gun stores/shows (*.pdf warning) and the like. The background check system has functioned quite well as a deterrence against criminals considering purchasing firearms at FFLs, but you do not measure a deterrence’s success based off the number of people it catches, especially when the mind-boggling majority of those people did not deserve to be caught in the first place.
(Courtesy of Random Nuclear Strikes.)
If there are that many false positives, I am sure the gun nuts who didn’t get to buy the latest glock would be all up in arms. You guys aren’t exactly known for keeping quiet when your “rights are infringed”. How come we don’t hear about it?
[...] to be a common trait with the antis — not getting the whole [...]
Ahh, the tired old argument of, “If we did not hear about it, it did not happen,” huh? I think I am going to start calling that the “Media Fallacy”.
1. The false positive data comes from a United States Department of Justice investigation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System. If you disagree with those numbers, take it up with those authorities.
2. Not all firearm owners/buyers are as hardcore internet users as I am.
3. If you care to actually look around, you do see those kinds of reports. Not a week goes by at one of the forums I haunt wherein someone does not make a, “I got denied, this is bulldren, how do I fix it?” post. Hell, with the number of those kinds of posts that are out there, the number of new posts concerning the topic will diminish considerably, given that the avenues of correction have been thoroughly marked (though, of course, not by the folks who actually have to do the corrections).
If you have some kind of evidence that indicates the above numbers are false, then, please, toss it up here and air it out. But casting baseless aspersions is typically not appreciated.
Anon,
If there are that many false positives, I am sure the gun nuts who didn’t get to buy the latest glock would be all up in arms.
That so-called thought would be accurate if the system didn’t clear up the ‘false positive’ and allow the purchase. Of course, if the system didn’t clear up the problem, they wouldn’t be a ‘false positive’ now would they?
See simple reasoning (I realize that may be a stretch for you) shows why the problem isn’t having people storming the gates. Gun buyers know and expect the government to screw up! As long as the problem is quickly resolved (and that sometimes happens immediately after the denial comes though — I watched one get resolved that way) gunnies put up with the system because they know the antis would push for worse.
How come we don’t hear about it?
Can you say “Media bias” in addition to the above explanation?
How many pro-firearm media outlets can you name?
Also Anon when you get a NICS denial you can contest it.
Never had it happen to me personally, but I believe it takes between 1 and 24 hours, so most cases the person wanders around the shop for a bit longer before the review is complete. In that case you have one of those denials being improperly cited, and you have a person walking out of a shop with a new gun.
I was initially denied for purchasing a second Glock 19 when I had bought one less than a month ago. This is in Virginia where we still have the stupid one-gun-a-month law but those of us with CCW permits are exempt from that. So I then went back to the store and showed them my CCW card as ID and the purchase went through.
Another false positive corrected.
@Bob S. – I would blame Sparky for this particular fallacy, but it certainly did not start with him… Why people believe that if it does not make the media, it does not happen is beyond me… Granted, if it did not make the media in the past, people never even thought to think about it, but that was the past, and we are learning more and more that the media is full of self-serving individuals who wholly ascribe to the theory that “if it bleeds it leads”. And NICS denials are pretty uninteresting news, compared to some things.
@Weer’d Beard – Thanks for the reminder about challenging NICS denials… And, yeah, I have heard about a lot of them being challenged on the spot, and being corrected as the customer stands there. The fact is that similar/same names, similar SSNs, similar addresses, etc. can cause you to pop as a “denial”, even though you have never broken any laws or anything. But anti’s love to downplay that.
@AntiCitizenOne – … And case in point. Thanks for sharing your experience!
Also remember SS# is optional on your NICS form. On a whim on my first gun buy I didn’t fill it out, and I left shortly there-after with a 1911 in my bag, haven’t done it every since, and that includes a few long-gun purchases outside of Massachusetts.
Depending on what the shop keeper recommends, I might submit my SS# just to clear up any confusion. But per the subject of this post, overall the NICS system is a hassle, and I have high doubts it accomplishes much but mess with lawful people exercising their rights, and divert our tax monies, so my cooperation should NOT be expected
Also as a young Anti I was firmly latched on the tit of the MSM, and I thought that “Assault Weapons” were fully automatic, and that they were commonly used in crime, and one could simply buy a machine gun as easily as buying a new camera. (Some of this I blame Hollywood too). I also thought that rounds like .223 Remington and 7.62×39 of oft maligned “Assault Weapons” would simply blow game animals like deer to pieces, making the bearded camo-wearing gentlemen (and they always seemed to be REALLY thin, or REALLY fat…and the thin ones ALWAYS had pony tails!) who said the law would ban their hunting rifle sound like liars.
And of course anybody who carried a gun around with them was paranoid, as I rarely heard of defensive gun uses.
The biggest turning factors for me were:
-Professor Kleck’s study, coupled with the FBI compiled Defensive gun police reports (being a scientist, I reckoned that professor Kleck’s numbers might be a bit high, but I knew it would be VERY unlikely that every DGU had a police report, especially when ALL the data showed that it was rare shots were fired)
- Learning the definitions of Semi vs. Fully Automatic. I had no idea, so I asked my Dad, he didn’t know either, so I assumed (having recently seen Robocop with his Burst-fire Beretta 93R) “Fully Automatic” were the machine guns that would spray bullets…semi-automatic had to be burst fire. I recently discovered my 17 year old nephew (and quite a brain, if I may boast) had the same misconception, when he asked how my Semi-auto FAL grouped its bursts.
-Learning Ballistics. Bullet weight and muzzle velocity quickly teaches you how to compare cartridges, and can help you make judgment calls about “Under Powered” vs. “Over Powered” for many applications like hunting, and target shooting.
These 3 points of information DESTROYED 90% of the anti-rights arguments.
Absolutely true, and it is probably something of a toss-up as to whether or not the SSN helps or hinders average background checks… it all depends on how common your name is, and how much the person on the other end of the phone/computer system fumble-fingers their typing.
As for the rest of your comment, I am going to have to steal that as part of post in the near future…
@Linoge – Working on a post about it m’self. Be up inside of an hour.
[...] Linoge has a great post about how the Brady Campaign picks meaningless metrics to make their failed agendas look far more successful than they really are. This lead me to think about my thoughts back when I was anti gun. As I said on BB&Guns I grew up in an area with virtually no gun culture, so my knowledge of guns was limeted to Hollywood, and the Main Stream Media, which in the early 90s was essentially a mouthpiece for the Brady Campaign. [...]
So I see. In that case, you can count on a link to it tomorrow sometime
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