By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, June 06, 2022
Here is a ratio to keep in mind when thinking about guns and crime: one in 10,000.
In 2018, the hilariously misnamed Government Accountability Office performed an audit of the federal government’s performance when it comes to prosecuting the easiest kind of gun-crime case; i.e., the crime that is committed when a prohibited person attempts to purchase a firearm through a licensed firearms dealer, a process that requires submitting to a background check. It is a crime for a prohibited person to try to purchase a firearm in any circumstance, but, in practically all of these cases, the person trying to buy the firearm lies on the background-check paperwork, which is called Form 4473 — and that is a felony that can bring as much as ten years in prison on the first offense and even more time when there are aggravating circumstances.
In 2017, the year the GAO audited, there were 112,000 attempts by prohibited persons to buy a firearm that were stopped by the background-check system — that’s 112,000 federal gun crimes in which the perpetrator signed his name on the form and thereby provided all the evidence needed to convict him. Shockingly, the federal government simply ignored about 100,000 of those cases, investigating only 12,700. To be clear, this isn’t a mere paperwork crime we are talking about: According to the GAO, 36 percent of those 112,000 denied firearms were convicted felons, 30 percent were subjects of protective orders, and 16 percent had been convicted of disqualifying domestic-violence misdemeanors. These are the very people who should be our top priorities when it comes to fighting gun crime; in fact, the Department of Justice reports that about 30 percent of those who fail a background check are arrested on another criminal charge within five years.
Here’s the really bad part: Out of those 12,700 cases that were taken up for investigation, there were only twelve prosecutions.
Put another way: If you get caught trying to buy a gun illegally in the most obvious and brazen way, your chances of being prosecuted are only about one in 10,000 — for comparison, a felon in the United States is about six times more likely to die in a murder than one of these offenders is to face prosecution.
On paper, illegal gun purchasing is something our government takes seriously: It is a felony that can bring ten years in federal prison. In practice, it is something the government does not take very seriously at all: Hence, only twelve prosecutions out of 112,000 violations.
That’s a prosecution rate of one in 10,000 for the people we know are trying to buy guns illegally.
Unbelievably, this story is worse than it looks.
The federal government conducts background checks for only 29 states and the District of Columbia, while 21 states do some or all of their own background checks: 13 states do all their own checks, and eight states do their own checks for handgun sales. The states that do their own checks include six of our ten our most populous states: California, Florida, Illinois, Pennsylvania, North Carolina, and Michigan. The background-check system stopped almost 70,000 illegal gun purchases in these states in 2017, according to the GAO audit. Different states handle these attempts to illegally acquire firearms in different ways, but ten of the 13 states that do their own checks do exactly the same thing: nothing. According to the GAO, the great majority of the states that handle their own background checks make no effort at all to investigate or prosecute illegal purchase attempts.
A new law signed by President Joe Biden in March mandates that local law-enforcement agencies be notified when someone tries to make an illegal purchase, but since this is a violation of federal law and may not be a violation of state laws, most of those local agencies either can’t or won’t prosecute these crimes. The local police may benefit from knowing which offenders in their jurisdictions are trying to get their hands on guns, but, if there is no crime to prosecute, then there isn’t very much they can do about it.
The closer you look, the worse the story gets. One of the categories of people prohibited from buying firearms comprises fugitives from justice. But for more than two decades, the FBI and the ATF could not agree on who should be defined as a fugitive — and, as a result, thousands of firearms that were wrongly sold to people considered fugitives by the FBI were simply ignored by the ATF, which made no effort to retrieve those guns, according to a report from the Office of the Inspector General at the Department of Justice. Eventually, the ATF’s less encompassing definition of “fugitive” prevailed, meaning that about a half a million people who would have been prohibited from buying a firearm became eligible again unless they were disqualified for some other reason.
Even when the ATF reports that a case has been resolved, the police work involved is sometimes . . . casual. As in, cases are opened and closed on the same day and filed as resolved even though no charge has been brought and no firearm has been recovered. An example from the DOJ’s OIG:
A case involving a person prohibited from possessing firearms due to a felony conviction for second degree battery was referred by the Brady Operations Branch to the appropriate division office on November 16, 2002, for a firearms retrieval. According to the case management log, the case was opened and closed on September 23, 2003, more than 10 months later. On that date, the ATF field office verified that the subject was a prohibited person and the subject was located and interviewed. The subject claimed that his firearm had been stolen from his vehicle in March or April 2003. He had not reported the theft to local authorities.
Let’s review that: In this case, a violent felon was successful in illegally purchasing a gun, and — almost a year after learning of that fact — an ATF agent knocked on his door and then left empty-handed after taking the word of that felon that he didn’t have the illegally purchased gun anymore.
Case closed.
Would you like to know what the ATF is doing instead of prosecuting these criminals? It is sending them text messages. The ATF says it likes to send armed criminals text messages because that is “less intimidating” than other courses of action its agents could take. I wonder how many Americans have to die before the ATF starts adding violent criminals as Facebook friends.
From 2019 to 2020, the United States saw a 30 percent increase in its homicide rate, according to the CDC — the largest single-year increase in recorded history. Yet the ATF is worried about hurting felons’ feelings.
Remember that figure: one in 10,000.
When you hear people on the right side of the gun debate demand that we “start enforcing the laws that are already on the books,” this is a big part of what we are talking about. We don’t need another candlelight vigil or another shallow moralistic homily. We need police and prosecutors to do their jobs. As it is, our government won’t even prosecute gun crimes when the criminal does all the casework himself and sends the necessary evidence to the feds in a personally signed and witnessed document.
I’m starting to suspect that we aren’t investigating the right criminals.
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