ANALYSIS/OPINION:

Like all deceits, the Democrat’s narrative about gun background checks is crumbling under inspection — thankfully, it is also exposing what must be done.

The evil actions of a murderer in Illinois, who killed five people after being fired from his job on Feb. 15, at first seemed convenient to Democrats in Congress as they push “universal” background check legislation (universal is in quotes because it can’t be universal when criminals, by definition, won’t follow it).

Last week, Democrats on the U.S, House of Representative’s Judiciary Committee passed the “Bipartisan Background Checks Act of 2019” with a partisan, party-line vote of 23-15. The bill is expected to be voted on this month by the entire House.

But now, with the facts starting to come out on how the gunman in Illinois got his handgun, the story has become inconvenient for Democrats.

The murderer, Gary Martin, had served time in prison in Mississippi for aggravated battery. In 1994, when his then-girlfriend told him to get out of their apartment, Martin beat her with a baseball bat and stabbed her with a butcher knife. Martin subsequently served about two years for the felony.

In 2014, Martin lied about his criminal record on an application for an Illinois Firearm Owners Identification card (known as a “FOID”). A background check at the time didn’t turn up his 1995 felony conviction. He soon got the FOID and used it to buy a handgun. When he later applied for a concealed-carry permit his felony conviction (barring him from buying or owning a firearm) turned up. The police sent him a letter telling him to turn in his FOID card and his handgun. But the police never followed up. They never did go and get the gun from him.

Martin used this handgun to murder five people and to wound multiple police officers in a shootout before our heroes in blue killed him.

So OK, the facts of this horrifying case can hardly be used to argue that a universal background check law would have stopped Martin. Nor would it stop the vast majority of criminals who simply steal or get a gun via the black market.

Martin’s case, however, is clearly another failure of our bureaucracy and that’s something we can at least try to fix.

It needs fixing. The FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) has had some glaring failures of late. The NICS system relies on state and local agencies, as well as the U.S. military, to give them records so they can stop prohibited people from buying firearms. The U.S. Air Force, to name one horrifying example, didn’t give NICS records that would have stopped Devin Patrick Kelley from buying his guns and using them to murder 26 people in Sutherland Springs, Texas.

This should tell us that the federal and state bureaucracies responsible need to be investigated. We need to understand their failures and to, if necessary, pass legislation to fix the system so our layers of government do a better job of applying the laws that are already on the books.

“The governor of Illinois needs to insist on an investigation,” says Larry Keane, senior vice president and general counsel for the National Shooting Sports Foundation (NSSF). “There was a complete breakdown in the system.”

Mr. Keane is understandably frustrated, as the NSSF, the trade association for firearms manufacturers, has been lobbying its FixNICS initiatives since 2013 after they found that some states were barely giving any records to NICS. Since then, the NSSF has gotten many states to give more records to NICS.

When investigating this latest failure of government, officials should at least acknowledge that Martin should have been prosecuted for lying on the forms he used to get a handgun. He lied when he applied for his gunowner’s ID. He also lied on a federal form when he filled out the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives’ Form 4473. This is the ATF form someone fills out when they want to purchase a gun from a licensed dealer. It is used by the FBI to perform the NICS check. Lying on this form is a felony.

Unfortunately, federal prosecutors rarely go to court to attempt to convict someone of illegally attempting to buy a firearm from a licensed dealer. Juries, they argue, can be understandably lenient with a person who, for example, passed bad checks when they were 18 years old and so ended up with a felony conviction. But when you have a person, like Martin, who went to jail for attacking someone with a baseball bat and a knife who is lying to get a gun it should be a no-brainer to prosecute them.

Despite the facts, a lot of Democrats who simply want more gun control are ignoring the real problems.

Last Saturday in New Hampshire, for example, New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, a Democrat from New York, was pushing the narrative that gun owners and their associations are responsible when she said that “we don’t pass gun reform in this country because of the NRA. It’s not about the Second Amendment or hunter’s rights. Let me be really clear: It’s about the gun manufacturers that fund the NRA that want to sell more weapons They don’t care that they’re selling a gun to someone who has grave mental illness and a violent record or someone with a criminal conviction or a violent crime. And that’s why they oppose universal background checks.”

Really senator, is that why the NSSF has been lobbying state by state for FixNICS legislation since 2013? Is that why the NRA supported NICS when the legislation was passed by Congress and why the NRA has supported it ever since?

Clearly, we need a truly bipartisan investigation of NICS to find out why it isn’t working.

• Frank Miniter is the author of “Spies in Congress: Inside the Democrats’ Covered-Up Cyber Scandal” (Post Hill Press, 2018).

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