Firearm background check liars escape charges

Shameka Peacock looks at her target while practicing shooting at the Lone Star Indoor Gun Range on Friday afternoon. Photo taken Friday 7/15/16 Ryan Pelham/The Enterprise Shameka Peacock looks at her target while practicing shooting at the Lone Star Indoor Gun Range on Friday afternoon. Photo taken Friday 7/15/16 Ryan Pelham/The Enterprise Photo: Ryan Pelham Photo: Ryan Pelham Image 1 of / 4 Caption Close Firearm background check liars escape charges 1 / 4 Back to Gallery

Gun buyers at Roy Bennett's Lone Star Gun and Indoor Range in Lumberton are required by law to fill out a form for a federal background check.

The check is to ensure the applicant has no criminal convictions that would bar gun ownership.

The process can take anywhere from a few seconds to three days, according to Bennett, who estimates he gets two or three rejections a year.

Any applicant tempted to lie on the form to pass the check stands to lose more than a new gun. He or she could face up to a decade in a federal prison.

As the number of people requesting background checks to buy firearms is at an all-time high, the number of people charged with lying on the form has significantly dropped in the past dozen years, according to a review by the Department of Justice.

Federal prosecutors nationwide, between 2004 and 2015, charged an average of 32 people a year with knowing they were forbidden from owning a gun but still trying to sneak past a background check, according to a report by the Office of Inspector General released Sept. 28.

That compares with 166 people charged in 2003, when the drop began.

The issue hits home in Texas, which is among the top states for requests.

Alice Tripp, of the Texas Rifle Association, said that such a low number of prosecutions speaks to a system in which authorities aren't going after the people who they know are breaking the law. That weakens the argument to expand the system.

"They are not prosecuted, and that drives me crazy," Tripp said.

"Criminals rejected by (National Instant Criminal Background Check System) are not being penalized, not getting the equivalent of a traffic ticket pinned on them," Tripp said. "Why would we have any confidence in a system stopping crime that is not punishing the criminals it catches now?"

Inspector General Michael Horowitz notes that in the wake of the Sandy Hook Elementary School massacre in 2012, in which 20 students and six adults were killed, President Barack Obama called on the Department of Justice to maximize enforcement efforts to prevent gun violence and prosecute gun crime.

Obama also called for other initiatives, including strengthening background checks and requiring them for all gun sales as part of his Now Is The Time plan to reduce gun violence.

The inspector general found "no significant" change in the number of prosecutions for lying on the background checks since Sandy Hook.

A record 23 million background requests were made last year in the United States, including 1.5 million in Texas, which ranked second behind California.

The National Instant Criminal Background Check System is administered by the FBI, which forwards the information to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to determine whether more investigation is needed and criminal charges might be warranted.

About 1 percent of the requests are denied each year. The most common reasons for denial include having a felony conviction punished by more than a year behind bars, being a fugitive from justice or having a misdemeanor conviction for domestic violence.

Horowitz noted in a videotaped message on the agency's website that the number of prosecutions for lying to get a gun has decreased, but the number of prosecutions for other gun crimes has increased in recent years.

The report does not include those numbers, and they weren't readily available from the Department of Justice, which declined comment.

Between 2008 and 2015, the ATF referred 558 persons to the Department of Justice for possible prosecution, and prosecutors accepted 254 of them, according to the report.

"We are a small organization with a big mission, but we will continue to do our best with the resources we have," said Mary Markos, a spokeswoman for the ATF. "Our agents will continue to do their job to investigate the denials sent to them.

"We will work closely with (federal prosecutors) as they determine if they will prosecute each case," Markos said.

John Malcolm Bales, the U.S. District Attorney for the Eastern District of Texas, said he doesn't prosecute as many background check cases as he previously did.

He said the ATF's emphasis has shifted in recent years toward keeping guns out of the hands of those who have committed violent offenses.

"You want to be very careful you spend your time and your resources on cases that matter," Bales said.

The Office of Inspector General gave federal agencies high marks for how the background check system worked, but said the agencies have room for improvement.

States need to be more efficient about quickly sharing information for the database, such as a person's criminal record or whether a court has found them to have mental illnesses that would prohibit gun ownership.

Texas attorney and former federal prosecutor Philip Hilder said it is no secret prosecutors face an increased workload and have to make tough choices.

"This is obviously hitting close to home here," Hilder said.

"We just had a mass shooting in the Houston area, and there seems to be an endless parade of these mass shootings, Hilder said. "It is a red-hot political issue right now whether to enforce some of the laws that are on the books."

Hilder noted that some of the shooters passed the background checks, but others, like the man charged with shooting several church parishioners in South Carolina, would have been denied permission to buy a gun if state authorities had sooner submitted information about his background to the database.

"It seems like the only thing keeping it from being enforced is a resource drain," he said. "Cases have to be prioritized, and the U.S. attorney has very limited resources given the amount of cases that come their way."

Dane.Schiller@chron.comNKrebs@BeaumontEnterprise.com twitter.com/nkrebs