Since 1994, the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, the federal law requiring federally licensed gun dealers to conduct background checks before gun sales, has prevented more than three million felons, fugitives, and other prohibited purchasers such as people with disqualifying mental health conditions from purchasing firearms.
Johnson gun license
But many dangerous people have fallen through the cracks, including several perpetrators of mass shootings. Current federal law subjects gun buyers to background checks only if the seller is a licensed dealer “engaged in the business” of selling firearms.
Collectors and private sellers at gun shows and individuals who advertise weapons on the Internet are not required to vet their customers. Those who acquire weapons from acquaintances, friends, or family are also exempt from federal background checks.
As a result, 22 percent of U.S. gun owners who acquired their most recent firearm within the previous two years did so without a background check, according to a 2017 study in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
These loopholes can prove lethal. Twenty-one-year-old Patrick Crusius bought the AK-47-style assault rifle he used to kill twenty-two people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas, on August 3 on the Internet, without a background check. That same weekend, twenty-four-year-old Connor Betts killed his sister and eight bystanders in a Dayton, Ohio, bar with a .223 caliber rifle he had purchased online from a Texas dealer without a background check.
The weekend after that, five people were killed and forty-three injured in shootings in Chicago’s impoverished neighborhoods, which have seen a below-the-radar flood of illegal weapons. Many of the guns that threaten these communities come from sellers in Indiana, Mississippi, and other states that have weaker laws than Illinois.
To close these gaps, fifteen states and the District of Columbia now require gun buyers to obtain a license, certificate, or permit to purchase, as it is sometimes called, according to the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence, a San Francisco-based nonprofit.
“Although 300 Americans are shot every day and 100 die, legislation has stalled in Congress, so states are taking the lead with strategies like licensing,” says David Hemenway, director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, a Boston-based nonprofit. “Licensing makes good sense because it limits access to firearms by individuals who pose a danger to themselves and others without casting a net so wide as to prevent law-abiding citizens from purchasing or possessing weapons.”
In general, here’s how it works: Prospective gun buyers must apply for a license with a state or local law enforcement agency, complete a comprehensive background check, and provide extensive biographical information. Some states also require applicants to be fingerprinted, complete gun-safety training, and demonstrate that they know how to handle guns. The process can take weeks or even months, Hemenway explains.
“Decreasing the ready availability of guns through licensing is highly effective in reducing homicides as well as suicides, which comprise two-thirds of all gun-violence deaths and are often overlooked in gun control proposals,” he says.
Since Connecticut implemented its licensing law in 1995, the state’s firearm-related homicide rate declined 40 percent in the following ten-year period, and its firearm-related suicide rate declined by 15 percent, concluded researchers at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland.
Studies show that between one-third and four-fifths of people who attempt suicide act on impulse. If they don’t have access to guns during the acute phase of despair, they will literally not be able to pull the trigger.
“The only way NICS examiners receive records of state-level convictions, mental health adjudications, and records of drug abuse and domestic violence is through voluntary submission by the states,” Crifasi says. “Some states do a better job than others in sharing lifesaving information.”
“Licensing makes good sense because it limits access to firearms by individuals who pose a danger to themselves and others without casting a net so wide as to prevent law-abiding citizens from purchasing or possessing weapons.”
Dylann Roof, who had a local drug charge, was able to legally purchase the Glock pistol he used to kill nine people at a prayer service in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015. The gun store processed the sale because an examiner at the National Instant Criminal Background Check System was not able to complete the screening process within the requisite three business days.
By requiring periodic renewal, licensing can help law enforcement determine whether a person is still eligible to possess a firearm. It can also help law enforcement retrieve the firearm, so it can’t be used in a crime or to harm a family member or coworker, says Crifasi.
For all of these reasons, passing licensing legislation on the state as well as the federal level was the top recommendation of the more than 140 advocates, survivors, and experts who attended an April 2019 conference on gun violence in Denver to mark the twentieth anniversary of the mass shooting at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. It was part of a larger program known as the Denver Accord.
“Licensing is based on solid evidence that guns don’t make Americans safer,” says conference attendee Penny Okamoto, executive director of Ceasefire Oregon, a Portland-based nonprofit. She notes that the rates of crimes of violence are actually lower in the United States than other developed nations but “are more likely to be lethal.” That’s because the United States has around 400 million guns—more than any other nation—and weaker laws.
In addition to licensing, the Denver Accord calls for extreme risk protection orders, safe storage, and reducing the lethality of firearms and ammunition, as well as reducing the presence of firearms in public spaces, funding community-based solutions, and police reform.
“More than forty organizations representing one million people, including the Newtown Action Alliance, States United to Prevent Gun Violence, and the Women’s March, have endorsed the Denver Accord,” Okamoto says. “We expect that number to rise as state and local groups use the recommendations as a roadmap.”
Winning approval for any gun control measure is an uphill battle. Congress hasn’t passed any new gun laws since 1994, when President Bill Clinton signed the Federal Assault Weapons Ban, which included the military-style weapons like the AR-15 that are frequently used in mass shootings.
The ban expired after ten years, leaving the states to take up the fight.
In 2018, twenty-six states and the District of Columbia passed sixty-seven laws to restrict guns, reports the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. While this did not include any gun-licensing laws, Okamoto believes this bodes well for efforts to extend licensing to other states.
“The National Rifle Association has a tremendous ability to mobilize its members and a prodigious fundraising and lobbying machine and exerts great influence over lawmakers,” she says. “But momentum is building for passages of common-sense gun laws because of the painstaking work organizations like Ceasefire Oregon have done.”
Founded in 1994 to sponsor an annual event where people turn in their firearms, Ceasefire Oregon has also worked with community groups to acquaint them with the link between suicide, domestic violence, and guns. As a result, Okamoto hopes public opinion will compel the legislature and Oregon Governor Kate Brown to pass legislation that combines licensing with other changes, including safe storage requirements and allowing gun dealers to refuse to sell weapons to people under the age of twenty-one.
Gun Laws
Passing licensing laws is often a long fight. In Illinois, “it took sixteen years to pass a gun-control measure, which included licensing, in 2014 because of opposition by downstate Republicans, especially those in rural areas,” says Kathleen Sances, president and chief executive officer of Gun Violence Prevention Political Action Committee (G-PAC). The group, a nonpartisan political committee in Arlington Heights, Illinois, was founded to counter the influence of the gun lobby in the state capitol.
But last May, Sances notes, the Illinois House approved a bill to tighten licensing requirements; the state senate did not take it up.
“Republicans are coming around to the position of Democrats in Chicago and independents throughout the state that licensing facilitates compliance and enforcement of background checks,” she says.
Sances predicts that when the bill, which among other measures requires applicants to apply in person at local law enforcement agencies—rather than online—and to be fingerprinted, is reintroduced in 2020, it will be approved in both chambers and signed by Democratic Governor J. B. Pritzker.
“An estimated 34,000 people in Illinois deemed no longer fit to have guns because of felonies and other disqualifying conditions retain them because the police don’t have the resources to confiscate them,” says Sances.
Even with these improvements, Sances cautions, “licensing won’t solve the epidemic of gun violence. Other strategies must be found to address social issues and root causes, such as poverty, lack of education, and joblessness.”
But licensing, she believes, is still worth fighting for.
Heading into 2020, Sances and other gun control advocates hope that more states will be passing or tightening their licensing laws. One measure that might be added is a discretionary licensing system.
According to Harvard’s Hemenway, local law enforcement officials in New Jersey, New York, and Massachusetts are now permitted to deny licenses when a person poses a potential danger. Police officials must submit a written opinion to a judge. Applicants have the right to challenge the denial in court.
“Massachusetts police turn down 2 percent of applicants,” Hemenway says. “The chiefs did so because applicants had a history of assault, domestic abuse, mental illness, or substance abuse.” He thinks putting this power in the hands of police makes sense because they “know more about the people in their communities than is in the files of the national data banks used for background checks.”
For instance, they may have had contact with family members who “show up at police stations and plead with officers not to give a license to a loved one who is depressed and has threatened suicide.”
Discretionary licensing might have helped keep guns out of the hands of Connor Betts and Patrick Crusius. Betts, the Dayton shooter, had been suspended from school in Bellbrook because he had posted on a lavatory wall a list of students he wanted to rape or murder. And, a few weeks before the Walmart mass shooting, Crusius’s mother had called Allen, Texas, police because she was concerned that her son was too immature to own and use a gun.
But as with all gun control measures, the obstacles are formidable.
Jeri Bonavia, executive director of the Wisconsin Anti-Violence Effort Educational Fund (WAVE), a Milwaukee-based nonprofit, believes licensing is an excellent solution that won’t be implemented anytime soon in her state.
“Although polls show that more than 80 percent of residents of Wisconsin, including gun owners, support gun control measures, the state legislature is in the grip of the corporate gun lobby,” Bonavia says.
WAVE, she explains, is working to convince the state’s GOP-controlled legislature and Democratic Governor Tony Evers to “get serious about gun violence, which claims the lives of 600 residents of Wisconsin each year.” WAVE action teams in the greater Milwaukee area, Madison, and the Fox Valley are meeting face-to-face with legislators and contacting school districts and city councils to pass resolutions aligned with the group’s policy priorities.
“We hope to get legislation passed that will close the private sale loophole, which allows almost anyone to sell a gun without the background check required of federally licensed dealers,” Bonavia says. “This loophole means that almost anyone can acquire a gun without identification and no questions asked.”
Jacob B. Charles, executive director of the Center for Firearms Law at Duke University School of Law in Durham, North Carolina, predicts that, like other gun control laws, licensing regulations will be a matter of fierce contention.
“The NRA is very passionate about challenging any gun control law as a violation of the Second Amendment right to maintain arms,” he says. “Even if twenty-five state courts have ruled that a particular gun control law is Constitutional, the NRA will challenge a similar law passed by another state.”
In a landmark 2008 decision, District of Columbia vs. Heller, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the Second Amendment protects an individual’s right to keep and bear arms for lawful purposes, such as the right to self-defense in the home. But Justice Antonin Scalia, in his majority opinion, wrote that the Second Amendment is not unlimited and “not a right to keep and carry any weapon whatsoever in any manner whatsoever and for whatever purpose.”
The states responded by passing laws that prohibited felons and people with domestic violence convictions from owning firearms, as well as registration and other regulations incorporated into licensing laws that the states upheld.
“Licensing won’t solve the epidemic of gun violence. Other strategies must be found to address social issues and root causes, such as poverty, lack of education, and joblessness.”
“The Supreme Court refused to review these cases, but that may change,” Charles says. “Since the Heller case was decided, Justices Anthony Kennedy and Antonin Scalia have left, and we don’t know how Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, who took their places, will view the scope of the Second Amendment.”
Constitutional questions generally fall into two areas, Charles explains. Does the regulation burden the gun owner, and does the government have a right to impose a restriction because doing so ensures public safety?
This term, he notes, the U.S. Supreme Court “has agreed to review a New York City gun law which imposes conditions on licenses and the means by which gun owners may take their guns from place to place. This law may be the first of many cases that the Supreme Court uses to define the scope of the Second Amendment.”
Licensing also promises to be an issue in the 2020 presidential election. In May 2019, one Democratic candidate, New Jersey Senator Cory Booker, made national licensing the centerpiece of his fourteen-point plan to curb gun violence. Besides having to submit fingerprints, sit for an interview, and complete a certified gun safety course, applicants would complete federal background checks. Gun licenses would be valid for five years. The concept is also backed by several other Democrats running for President.
But, as usual, this is an area in which politicians appear to be followers of public opinion, not leaders. A PBS Newshour, NPR, and Marist poll released in September 2019 found that 72 percent of Americans support requiring all gun buyers to have a license.