The shooting rampage last week at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, has reopened the debate over loopholes and flaws in the FBI’s background check system and could drive needed reforms through Congress, according to administration and Hill officials.

And it couldn’t happen fast enough, they add.

That is because there are major holes in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, or NICS, that has allowed a handful of recent mass killers legally barred from buying guns to get one. In fact, in one recent study, 22 percent of gun buyers said they did not go through NICS first.

Here is a list of 13 major problems with the information collected for NICS:

Department of Defense does not universally input those dishonorably discharged and others not allowed to buy guns, like Devin Patrick Kelley, the gunman in the November 5, 2017 slaying of 26 at the First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas. He was convicted in a court martial while in the Air Force.

Lets legal dealers to sell a gun after three days even if the FBI has not returned its background check decision, which aided Dylan Roof get the gun he used to kill nine churchgoers in Charleston, S.C. on June 17, 2015.

Just 8 percent of those barred from buying guns are arrested after trying to get one, including convicts and illegal immigrants.

States are not required cooperate with NICS, despite federally appropriated money to encourage them.

Several states that do provide information to NICS, often give too little, or are slow to provide, lists of those who should be denied guns, like felony convicts.

Much mental health information is missing, as was the case in the 2007 Virginia Tech killing spree by Seung-Hui Cho who bought a gun disqualifying mental health record.

Information from the National Data Exchange, an FBI repository of unclassified criminal justice records, is not included in NICS.

In a handful of cases, the FBI immediately decided to ban a purchase but took months to tell the seller.

ATF and FBI don’t agree on the definition of “fugitive from justice,” and as a result, ATF did not track down 2,183 guns that were sold but where the FBI subsequently said sales should have been denied.

In some cases, as with the alleged Florida killer, multiple run-ins with the FBI or local police do not rise to the level of a registered threat that NICS would count as disqualifying.

Some purchasers are wrongly denied by the FBI. In 2015, there were 3,625 wrongful denials.

Omits private sales.

Omits transfers to friends, family, others.

The House has already OK’d a NICS fix, and Sen. John Cornyn is leading the effort in the Senate in a bipartisan bid backed by President Trump and the National Rifle Association.



“This is one of those rare times when folks who are ardent believers in the Second Amendment, as am I, and those who are perhaps less inclined to be enthusiastic about the Second Amendment rights of law-abiding citizens, where we can come together and say, ‘Well, let’s at least fix the current law,’” Cornyn said about his proposal. “Let’s make sure that if somebody’s disqualified from buying a firearm that this National Instant Criminal Background Check System actually works.”

The legislation would provide incentives to get states to cooperate more and faster. It would also hold federal agencies accountable for failing to input information.

It would also creates a “Domestic Abuse and Violence Prevention Initiative” to help states share information “showing that a felon or domestic abuser is excluded from purchasing firearms under current law.”

The target is to add millions of people who should be barred from buying guns to the NICS list, which was created in 1998.



NRA Executive Vice President Wayne LaPierre has suggested that there are seven million missing felons from the banned list and that 38 states provide less than 80 percent of needed information to NICS.

DON'T MISS: What Fixing NICS Really Entails – And What it Does NOT Portend #FixNICS --> https://t.co/0UJNkW4YZm — NSSF (@NSSF) December 8, 2017



The gun industry’s main association, the National Shooting Sports Foundation, has established a campaign to fix the NICS system and said recent efforts have prompted many states to do more.

“Since FixNICS was launched in 2013 through the end of 2016, the number of disqualifying mental health records submitted to NICS increased by 170 percent to nearly 4.5 million, from about 1.7 million in December 2012,” said the group. “This significant increase is driven by states like Pennsylvania, which now has 794,589 records, compared to 1 in 2012. New Jersey, another FixNICS success story, has now submitted 431,543 records, up from 17 in 2012, and is now ranked as the 2nd best state on a per capita basis,” it added.

Paul Bedard, the Washington Examiner's "Washington Secrets" columnist, can be contacted at pbedard@washingtonexaminer.com