Many gun owners are hidden criminals.

[Atypical Liberal]

62. A background check is NEVER GOING TO CATCH EVERYONE.

Look, no background check is going to catch EVERYONE who should not own a gun.

The background check has to be limited enough to be effective without making it unduly difficult for people to buy firearms.

Of course, many anti-gun people want to make it as difficult as possible to own firearms.

Today, this is the federal requirement for who cannot legally receive a firearm:

http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/nics/general-information/fact-sheet

Federal Categories of Persons Prohibited From Receiving

A delay response from the NICS Section indicates the subject of the background check has been matched with either a state or federal potentially prohibiting record containing a similar name and/or similar descriptive features (name, sex, race, date of birth, state of residence, social security number, height, weight, or place of birth). The federally prohibiting criteria are as follows:

A person who has been convicted in any court of a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year or any state offense classified by the state as a misdemeanor and is punishable by a term of imprisonment of more than two years.
Persons who are fugitives of justice—for example, the subject of an active felony or misdemeanor warrant.
An unlawful user and/or an addict of any controlled substance; for example, a person convicted for the use or possession of a controlled substance within the past year; or a person with multiple arrests for the use or possession of a controlled substance within the past five years with the most recent arrest occurring within the past year; or a person found through a drug test to use a controlled substance unlawfully, provided the test was administered within the past year.
A person adjudicated mental defective or involuntarily committed to a mental institution or incompetent to handle own affairs, including dispositions to criminal charges of found not guilty by reason of insanity or found incompetent to stand trial.
A person who, being an alien, is illegally or unlawfully in the United States.
A person who, being an alien except as provided in subsection (y) (2), has been admitted to the United States under a non-immigrant visa.
A person dishonorably discharged from the United States Armed Forces.
A person who has renounced his/her United States citizenship.
The subject of a protective order issued after a hearing in which the respondent had notice that restrains them from harassing, stalking, or threatening an intimate partner or child of such partner. This does not include ex parte orders.
A person convicted in any court of a misdemeanor crime which includes the use or attempted use of physical force or threatened use of a deadly weapon and the defendant was the spouse, former spouse, parent, guardian of the victim, by a person with whom the victim shares a child in common, by a person who is cohabiting with or has cohabited in the past with the victim as a spouse, parent, guardian or similar situation to a spouse, parent or guardian of the victim.
A person who is under indictment or information for a crime punishable by imprisonment for a term exceeding one year.

Most, if not all, of these prohibitions involve the due process of law. Moreover, they require that people who have been disqualified be reported and recorded in the database.

It is well known that many states have been lax in their reporting, and I think everyone agrees that that needs to change. If it takes federal tax dollars to enable states to comply, so be it.

I think the NICS does a great job at weeding out ineligible criminals and people who have been adjudicated mentally incompetent - the biggest sources of problem people with firearms. And it's fast - you can usually get NICS approval in a matter of minutes.

Now, if you want to make the background check process more effective, you can certainly go to more extremes. You could require an in-depth, in-person background check, paying an interviewer (with tax dollars) to interview the applicant's friends and family. You could require an in-person psychological evaluation (at taxpayer expense).

This is much the same process as one endures when applying for a Secret or Top Secret clearance. It should be noted that a Secret clearance costs from $700-$3000 to execute, while a Top-Secret clearance costs between $3000 and $15,000. There were nearly 11 million firearm sold in 2011. That could mean a cost of between $7 BILLION and $165 BILLION a year.

And there are some important issues to consider here:

Firstly, what about the inconvenience to all of the people who pass the background check? You'll probably find that the vast majority of people pass with flying colors, which means you just wasted a ton of money for nothing - money that could have been spent on social programs or other crime-prevention techniques. And these people will be delayed by weeks or months while complying with the checks.

Secondly, are you really going to weed out that many more people by very in-depth background checks vs. the relatively simple NICS check? There does come a point of diminishing returns where it starts to cost you a lot more money and effort to screen out fewer and fewer ineligible people.

The single-biggest problem group of people with firearms are criminals. It is well-known from studies of criminology that most people who commit murder, with a firearm or otherwise, almost universally have a long prior criminal history - a history that would prohibit them from buying a gun.

Thus it is likely that if you did nothing more than stop criminals from buying guns you would solve the majority of firearm crime problems.

The problem here is that nearly anyone can buy a gun with no background check. While there are exceptions in a few states, in most places anyone can open up their local classified ads and buy a gun from a private individual.

So the real question is how do you require background checks on private sales?

The way Illinois does this is they require every firearm owner to obtain a Firearm Owner ID license (FOID). When you sell a firearm to a private individual, you are required to make a record of the buyer's FOID information and keep it for 10 years. Failure to do so is a misdemeanor. There is an incentive to keep obey the law because if you sell to a person without a valid FOID that means they probably have a criminal record and are likely to use that firearm in a crime, which may result in it being recovered at a crime scene or from a criminal and being traced back to the last legitimate owner.

I like the Illinois system, except that it creates a firearm registry. The way to negate this is to make the FOID system opt-out rather than opt-in. Simply run a NICS check on every person who applies for a driver's license or state-issued ID, unless they choose to opt out. Because many people will end up getting FOIDs who do not actually own firearms, the state cannot use the list of FOID holders as a list of firearm owners.

Then, require, as Illinois already does, the recording of FOID info for all private sales, with penalties for failing to comply. I would go so far as to have stiffer penalties for sellers for whom their sold firearm ends up being used in a crime if they cannot demonstrate that they recorded the buyer's FOID information or if it can be shown that the criminal had such a lengthy criminal history they could never have bought it legally.