The Business of Guns

a background check themselves. As a result, the number of licenses in the city fell from 57 to just 7. A similar initiative in New York City saw the number of licensed dealers drop from 950 to 259. What’s more, where federal and state laws overlap, the risk of dealers dropping through the cracks grows. A famous 1993 North Carolina initiative found that 23 percent of federally licensed gun dealers lacked the state license needed to sell guns. One further solution may be to not punish or charge licensed gun dealers, but simply to educate them. An examination of federal and state licensed gun dealers in Alabama revealed that nearly 1,000 did not know about the state requirements regarding the sale of guns. Screening Buyers: What’s Being Done The 1994 Brady Bill required all federally licensed firearm dealers to conduct not only a background check on handgun buyers, but also a one-week waiting period before transferring the gun to the buyer. In 1996, licensed dealers became prohibited from selling firearms to any American with a prior domestic violence conviction. In 1998 the provisions of the Brady Bill expanded background checks to rifles and shotguns, but also removed the waiting period for dealers capable of running instant background checks. While the Brady Bill has become a lightning rod for criticism by gun-freedom politicians and the gun lobby, the data its provisions have collected indicate the number of Americans who attempt to purchase guns despite belonging to a prohibited class like felons or domestic abusers: of the 38 million background checks run between 1994 and 2001, over 800,000 (or about 2 percent) resulted in rejection. Nearly 60 percent of those rejected had a felony conviction or indictment . The passage of the Brady Bill, furthermore, has resulted in the enforcement of background checks and waiting periods in 32 states, due to the fact that the other 18 states already had

Chapter 5: Stopping Illegal Sales

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