The Editorial Board

USA TODAY

Every time children are slaughtered in a school, or movie goers in a shopping mall or worshipers in a church, a refrain echoes from the National Rifle Association: America doesn't need more firearm laws; just enforce those already on the books.

Well, now the nation has a president the NRA loves. How's that enforcing-what's-on-the-books thing workin' out?

Not so good.

Trump's Justice Department, as well as several states that do their own background checks, almost never prosecute what are called "lie and try" felonies. This is when someone legally barred from owning a gun — often a convicted felon, a violent spouse abuser or someone with a serious mental illness — lies on a federal background check to make a purchase.

The FBI, in reviewing instant background checks for firearm purchases, detected 112,000 lie-and-try crimes in fiscal 2017 alone, and federal investigators had names and addresses on the filled-out forms. How many were prosecuted? Twelve, according to a recent Government Accountability Office report.

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The offenders are often violent people so desperate to get a gun that they'll risk going to jail over it. Except almost no one puts them in jail. That can be a serious mistake: In about every seventh case, the person ultimately acquires a firearm and commits a crime, according to a 1990s assessment by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

The assessment was ordered by David Chipman, a former ATF official who is now senior policy adviser for a gun-control group formed by former Congresswoman Gabby Giffords. Chipman says lie-and-try crimes are "a red flag" that should be prosecuted.

The failure to do so is not entirely a federal government sin: 13 states conduct their own background checks on firearm purchases, and 10 of them don't investigate or prosecute anyone for lying to buy a gun.

One of those is California, which has restrictive guns laws and is weighing novel measures to limit the sale of ammunition,but each year the state declines to prosecute 10,000 people who illegally try to purchase firearms.

Many state and federal officials say they don't have the resources to deal with a growing numbers of lie-and-try cases. But three states — Oregon, Pennsylvania and Virginia — place a premium on their prosecution and take hundreds of violators to court each year. Pennsylvania, for one, sees this as a strong deterrent to gun violence.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions seems to have grasped this after the GAO investigation was launched. He directed U.S. attorneys to "swiftly and aggressively prosecute" lie-and-try cases.

Other firearm laws could also use enhancement. Too many states still fail to provide disqualifying records to the FBI's instant background-check system or decline to prosecute "straw purchases," where people illegally buy guns for others.

The bottom line is that Americans are shooting and killing themselves and each other at rates that dwarf trends in other developed nations. The debate goes on over implementing stronger gun-control laws, but there should be no quarrel about improving the enforcement of those already on the books.

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