3.2.a "The Brady Act stopped thousands of violent felons from getting guns since its enactment in 1993."
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This article is from the talk.politics.guns Official Pro-Gun FAQ, by Ken Barnes (kebarnes@cc.memphis.edu) with numerous contributions by others.
3.2.a "The Brady Act stopped thousands of violent felons from getting guns since its enactment in 1993."
see_Uniform Crime Reports for the United States, 1992,"(see above)
Houston Post, February 28, 1995, p. A1
"Gun Control -- Implementation of the Brady Handgun Violence
Prevention Act," General Accounting Office report, GAO/GGD-96-22
[This study of the effect of the Brady Act in selected law
enforcement jurisdictions was issued by the General Accounting
Office on January 25, 1996, but does not draw any nationwide
conclusions.]
In summary: According to a report released on February 28, 1995 by
the Clinton Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and
Firearms, the Brady handgun waiting period law (see Appendix I.) was
a success. But a success when compared to what? BATF's study of
the effect of the law in 30 jurisdictions which had not had a waiting
period before, conducted between March of 1994 and January 1995 showed
that of 441,545 applications or background checks run, some 15,506
were denied, or about 3.5%. However, the BATF study admitted that only
4,365 of these were convicted felons, which brings the denials down to
0.99%. Of the total denials, 649 were illegal drug users, which is not
a violent crime, but is a felony, and would disqualify a gun purchaser.
Excluding this nonviolent category of felony from the count of convicted
felons results in 0.84% denials, assuming there is no overlap between
the violent felons and the drug users listed in the study.
The Clinton Administration estimated that some 40,000 persons were
denied under the Brady Act nationwide. Assuming that's correct, then
the 15,506 included in the study constitute 38.8% of the national total,
and the 441,545 checks run in the study are an equivalent proportion
of the total checks run for the nation. This means that some 1,141,000
background checks were run, and assuming that this turned down violent
felons at the rate of 0.84%, about 9,600 violent felons were turned down
nationwide. If each check took 10 minutes to run, this amounts to some
11,410,000 minutes of law enforcement time, or 190,167 hours, or 15,847
twelve-hour workdays. If a law enforcement officer typically works a
five day week, with twelve hour shifts, this amounts to 61 cop/years,
or about 37 violent felons a day. In other words, a reasonable estimate
of the number of full-time law enforcement officers the Act took off
the streets during the study period is 61. If the amount of time it
took to run each check was greater than 10 minutes, the number of
officers taken off the street by the Act was even higher.
Divided over the nation's law enforcement officers, a total of about
550,000, this amounted to about twenty minutes work for every cop in the
country, with each cop catching 0.017 violent felons during the year.
In other words, you had to have about 12 cops working an hour each
before you catch one violent felon by running Brady Act background
checks! Or, put another way, for each 100 cops that spent_all_day"
doing background checks, you would catch about 61 violent felons.
Consider, in reality, that added workload was borne by only a fraction
of the total officers, so in rural counties, with low numbers of law
enforcement officers per capita, Brady checks may have well consumed
a significant proportion of their workday. It's no wonder that rural
law enforcement officers sued the Clinton Administration because of
this unfunded mandate, and the impositions of the law on local law
enforcement were found to be unconstitutional under the Tenth Amendment
by the U.S. Supreme Court. (See Appendix I., and Appendix V.)
At the same time, it's important not to forget that 30,400 people
who were not violent felons were denied purchase during the year, though
perhaps as many as 1,677 of these were illegal drug users, and 177 were
mentally disabled. This gives the Brady checks a false positive rate of
about 2.5%, or one out of every 40 people who applied were unjustly
denied, some 117 each workday. At the same time, 37 violent felons got
caught each workday. The act would thus seem to "catch" law-abiding
citizens at a rate three times as high as it "caught" violent felons!
The proportion of violent felons "caught" by the Brady check would be
expected to diminish as criminals shifted exclusively to other means of
acquiring weapons. As a comparison, an estimated 742,130 arrests were
made in 1992 for violent crime, or about 2,854 each workday. As a
crime-fighting measure, Brady checks were a tiny blip on the screen, and
inconvenienced both police and law-abiding citizens on a daily basis.
The possibility existed, with so many false positives, that the Act might
be abused to deny legitimate purchases due to_any_legal infraction, like
a speeding ticket, and would have required going to court to show that
your record does not disqualify you from owning a gun. The 1996 General
Accounting Office report on the Brady Act did show that some denials
were due to misdemeanor warrants on unpaid traffic tickets. The idea
that violent criminals got more than a small fraction of their guns
through legitimate channels, or that the Brady Act thwarted the
acquisition of handguns by determined criminals to any significant
degree, and lead to more arrests, is unsupported by the available
evidence. By the time the background checks were run, a criminal would
be long gone, or have already acquired a firearm by theft or through
an illegal dealer. An instant background check system, like that
supported by the NRA, and required to be implemented by the FBI by
the end of November 1998, should help put more police out on the street,
reduce the hassle and delay to the law-abiding, and provide an
occasional opportunity to make a quick arrest. As of July 1995, the
Brady Act had resulted in only_seven_federal convictions, of which none
were against violent felons.
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