On Fox News Sunday, host Chris Wallace asked the NRA’s chief lobbyist, Chris Cox, about the 72-hour limit for gun background checks. Under current law, if the federal government isn’t able to complete a check within 72 hours, the dealer can proceed with the sale. This loophole is what allowed Dylann Roof to obtain a gun, which he later used to murder 9 people in a South Carolina Church.

Wallace asked Cox if he would support extending the waiting limit so more people like Roof wouldn’t slip through the cracks. Cox dodged the question but argued that the NRA has fought to make the National Instant Criminal Background Check System more comprehensive.

“The National Rifle Association has worked to include every mental health record, every court adjudication, every criminal record to make sure people don’t fall through the cracks,” Cox said.

As Wallace noted, this is a lie.

In February, Trump signed legislation that “blocked the Social Security Administration from reporting mentally impaired recipients to a national background-check database.” The NRA supported the legislation.


The move mean the background check system will not include information on people who the Social Security Administration have determined “lack the mental capacity to manage their own affairs.” The designation is given to people as a result of “marked subnormal intelligence, or mental illness, incompetency, condition, or disease.”

The NRA mocked the effort to include Social Security Administration information in the gun database. “Grandma got run over by Obama,” the NRA sneered last December.

The NRA said the Social Security administration had been “coopted into the federal government’s gun control apparatus.” It described the rule as “one more reminder of the petty, partisan politics of Barack Obama.”