A study out this week by Mayors Against Illegal Guns, Mayor Bloomberg‘s research and advocacy group, gives fresh urgency to an anti-crime imperative: closing the bazooka-size loophole that lets thousands upon thousands of convicted criminals snap up firearms every year.
Just about all sane Americans — we’re not counting members of Congress — agree that everyone should undergo a background checks when buying a weapon, to keep pistols, rifles and worse out of the hands of lawbreakers and the insane.
Hell, the leadership of the National Rifle Association in its saner days supported those checks.
We already know hoodlums will always try to get weapons via the black market. Case in point: the illegal-guns-through-the-mail ring busted Thursday by NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly and Manhattan DA Cy Vance.
But as the saying goes, the real scandal is not what’s illegal, but what’s legal. A staggering 40% of guns sold — about 6.6 million last year alone — were considered private transactions and exempt from the federal background review that legit gun shops must run on all buyers.
It is a huge, bleeding exception, once called the gun show loophole, that’s growing through ever-expanding person-to-person internet commerce.
Bloomberg’s group studied the postings on just one website, Armslist.com. Last month, it hosted 83,000 active ads for weapons, most posted by sellers. For three months this year, investigators honed in on the minority of the ads — those from would-be buyers hungry for background-check-free firepower. They took their names and ran them against criminal record checks .
And 3.3% — 1 in 30 — had records. That’s a rate four times higher than what’s found at gun shops. And when a buyer fails the check at a gun shop, he leaves emptyhanded and law enforcement is notified for potential perjury charges.
Who knows how many more had mental illness, domestic violence records or were drug abusers — all categories that would block them from making an in-store gun purchase.
Earlier this year, when the country was still reeling from the Sandy Hook massacre, a majority of the Senate was in favor of closing the loophole. They had 92% of the public behind them.
They caved to the loud, thuggish 8%.
There’s an obvious solution waiting for sensible people to pick it up and run with it: Require any private seller to pay a small fee to a gun shop to run a background check on a buyer. The known criminal, crazies and druggies would be stopped — just as they are when they try to buy from a licensed dealer.
Why, in God’s name, can’t that be done?
