A criminal background check for private sales was blocked days before it was due to go into effect – which shows the difficulties of passing stricter gun laws

Last November, Nevada voters narrowly approved a new gun control law that would have required private sellers to conduct the same criminal background check on buyers that licensed gun dealers already use. Closing the loophole was one of the lone bright spots for gun control advocates in an election that put the National Rifle Association’s chosen candidate, Donald Trump, in the White House.

But Nevada’s new gun law has never been enforced. Days before it was slated to go into effect, the state’s Republican attorney general released a legal opinion concluding that citizens were “excused from compliance”, calling the new law unenforceable.

The attorney general who made the decision, Adam Paul Laxalt, spoke at the NRA’s annual meeting this year, where he was hailed by the NRA’s chief lobbyist for ensuring that Nevada’s new background check legislation for private sales was still not the law of the land. Laxalt had publicly opposed the background check measure before it passed, a mark of opposition the NRA had publicized in its fight against the measure.

The legal opinion from Laxalt’s office blamed the FBI for refusing to conduct the new checks – and ruled the law could be enforced as soon as the FBI changed its mind. An FBI spokeswoman did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the continued legal standoff, which the director of Nevada’s department of public safety said had left them “frustrated” and “stuck”.

“We want folks to have background checks,” the public safety director, James Wright, said.

Enforcing Nevada’s new background check law might not have made any difference to how easily the perpetrator of Sunday’s attack on a country music concert – named by law enforcement officials as 64-year-old Stephen Paddock – was able to stockpile dozens of guns. The attack left least 59 people dead and more than 500 injured in the deadliest mass shooting in recent American history.

Law enforcement officials have said Paddock had no serious criminal record, which would probably mean that a background check would not have flagged him as unfit to purchase a gun. At least one gun store in Mesquite, Nevada, where Paddock lived, confirmed that it had sold him several guns legally, and that he had passed a background check. But Nevada’s new law, if it had been enforced, might have provided another paper trail to help law enforcement track down the sources of some of Paddock’s other guns.

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The stalemate over Nevada’s new background check law highlights the many difficulties of passing stricter gun laws in the United States: the fierce opposition from Republican politicians, the challenges of building on a national background check system that is missing crucial records, and the missteps of gun control groups desperately trying to make new gun laws as inoffensive as possible, and sometimes a simple failure to coordinate.

Wright, Nevada’s public safety director, said he was astonished that the gun control advocates who crafted the initiative had never talked to anyone from his department.

“That’s why we’re so frustrated,” he said. “I just wish the measure people would have talked to us. I think if they would have talked to us we could have advised them on what to say.

“I think we could have saved them a whole bunch of headaches.”

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Adam Skaggs, the chief counsel at the Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, which supported the expanded background check law, said: “It’s a very unfortunate situation, that the will of the voters of Nevada has been thwarted. The attorney general has not made any effort to implement the law and indeed appears to be eager not to enforce the will of the voters.”

State leaders have negotiated many different systems for sharing background check duties with the FBI, and he said, there’s no reason Nevada should not be able to do the same.

Skaggs said: “Had there been more communication between all of the stakeholders before the drafting process it is possible this impasse could have been avoided.”

On its website, the NRA has defended Laxalt from what it has called unfair attacks in the media over his background check decision. The gun rights group said the initiative “was poorly written by out-of-state gun control groups that clearly did not understand Nevada’s existing firearms background check system” and called it “doomed from the start”.

By blaming the attorney general, gun control groups were attempting to “escape responsibility for their own failure”, a post on the NRA’s Institute for Legislative Action argued.

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A spokesperson for Laxalt did not respond to requests for comment on Monday.

Laxalt is seen as a potential candidate in the state’s 2018 governor’s race, and the Nevada Independent reported in June that Laxalt’s campaign “has sent at least two emails linking to pieces defending his decision not to enforce the ballot question, including links to donate to his campaign account”.

Wright said his impression was that the background check legislation had specified that the FBI would conduct the background checks as a cost-saving measure, since Nevada charged $25 for its state background checks, and the FBI’s instant background check system was free. The fee for background checks has been a source of grumbling for years, Wright said.

But what might have been a political advantage in advocating for a new law came at a significant cost to public safety and the law’s potential effectiveness, Wright said. Nevada’s state background check records system, the “central repository”, has access to a much wider range of records that might disqualify someone from gun ownership, including domestic violence protection orders. “Female deaths by guns in Nevada is high and a lot of it is associated with domestic violence,” he said. In his view, the Nevada state system simply provides a better-quality background check.

The FBI agreed with this assessment after the new law passed last year, arguing that Nevada could provide a “more comprehensive” background check with its own records, and concluding that the state, and not the FBI, should be responsible for conducting the new checks.

Since America’s state lawmakers have also shown themselves unwilling to support gun control, advocates have begun pursuing a different tactic: asking voters themselves to approve new gun control measures directly, through state initiatives placed directly on the ballot.

Nevada is one of a series of states that has seen gun control legislation make progress on the state level, even as Congress refused to pass new national gun control laws. National gun rights and gun control groups poured millions of dollars into the fight over Nevada’s initiative last year.

On Monday, Elizabeth Becker, a volunteer with the Nevada chapter of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America,said: “It’s a heartbreaking day here. It’s particularly tough because we took a big step as Nevadans last year to prevent tragedies like this. Our elected officials have an obligation to work to implement the law that voters passed, and now is the time.”