Study By Anti-Gun Researchers Finds Universal Background Checks Do Nothing to Decrease Violence, Suicides

There are no more anti-gun academic research operations than Garen Wintemute’s UC Davis Violence Prevention Research Program and Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health. For that reason, they’re among the most-quoted “authorities” for the mainstream media when it comes to the results of their research and bolstering the case against civilian firearm ownership.

But the results of a recent study haven’t gotten much mainstream attention. For some reason.

The two anti-gun operations released the conclusions of a decade-long study of universal background checks in the gun control utopia of California. And they found . . .

A study of firearm homicide and suicide rates in the 10 years after California simultaneously mandated comprehensive background checks for nearly all firearm sales and a prohibition on gun purchase and possession for persons convicted of most violent misdemeanor crimes found no change in the rates of either cause of death from firearms through 2000.

It must have made Wintemute cringe to bang that out on his laptop. And then there’s this:

“In the 10 years after policy implementation, firearm suicide rates were, on average, 10.9 percent lower in California than expected, but we observed a similar decrease in non-firearm suicide,” said Garen Wintemute, professor of emergency medicine and director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at UC Davis, senior author on the study. “This suggests that the policies’ estimated impact on firearm suicide may be part of broader changes in suicide risk around the time that the California policies were implemented,” he said.

In other words, the decrease had nothing to do with the change in the law.

The study found no net difference between firearm-related homicide rates before and during the 10 years after policy implementation.

One more time, for emphasis.

The study found no net difference between firearm-related homicide rates before and during the 10 years after policy implementation.

So all that horse hockey we continually hear about “closing the gun show loophole” and mandating all private sales go through an FFL produces…precisely…zero…real world results.

Well, if you exclude the hassle and expense that California’s gun owners have had to endure since the law went into effect.

But wait…there’s more!

“Incomplete reporting of prohibiting data to background check systems in the 1990s, prior to implementation of the policies in California, is an important limiting factor,” Wintemute said. “In 1990, only 25 percent of criminal records were accessible in the primary federal database used for background checks, and centralized records of mental health prohibitions were almost nonexistent. As a result, a large number of people likely passed their background checks even in cases where, according to law, they should have been prohibited from purchasing a firearm. This remains a serious problem today; mass shootings have resulted from prohibited persons passing background checks and purchasing firearms.”

Wintemute writes that “the quality and completeness of the records upon which background checks are completed has improved significantly since 2000,” but doesn’t specify how much better the Golden State is now doing in reporting prohibiting information to the NICS system.

Is it 40% now? That would be a “significant improvement.” How about…60%. One thing is for sure. It isn’t anywhere close to 100%. If it were, Wintemute would have made sure to tout that fact in the press release.

So, reading between the lines, the state with the most restrictive gun laws — the one that professes to care the most about stopping “gun violence” can’t get its act together enough to reliably report criminal convictions and other relevant information to the FBI.

And if California has this many holes in its reporting system, what must the other 49 states look like?

All of which confirms what gun owners have been saying all along. The NICS system is little more than a huge, expensive exercise in security theater. A system that does little more than inconvenience and extract cash from law-abiding gun owners while those who commit actual crimes with guns in this country sidestep the system.

So to summarize, California’s onerous universal background check law has done literally nothing to reduce the crime rate or number of suicides there. And the state does a significantly incomplete job of reporting disqualifying information to the FBI’s NICS background check system.

But more gun control laws are always the answer to the “public health crisis” that is “gun violence” in America. And the next time there’s a high-profile shooting somewhere with multiple victims, all the same people with the same civilian disarmament agenda will be all over the media advocating for all the same “solutions.”

The fact that none of these prescriptions have ever been shown to work won’t make the slightest bit if difference.

Same as it ever was.