Tuesday, December 05, 2017

A Review?

It seems that the FBI did a review of background checks last year and found that 4000 people bought guns who should have been caught in the NICS background checks.
A USA TODAY review found that the FBI issued more than 4,000 requests last year for agents from the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco Firearms and Explosives to retrieve guns from prohibited buyers.
Which leads to a number of troubling questions.  Not the least of those is the question; What review, and what records.  As I understand the statute, NICS background checks can only be kept for 24 hours.  So, how could USA TODAY possibly review records that are not supposed to exist?

I'm going to have to talk to my Congressman about this.

4 comments:

Old NFO said...

That is a damn good question... Grrr...

Rivrdog said...

Except, I'm gonna bet that when NICS is failed, the record is frozen and CAN be kept past 24 hours....

MattB said...

It's not USA TODAY accessing the records-- it's the FBI accessing the supposedly non- existent records.

Jonathan H said...

My understanding is that passed/ successful NICS records are destroyed; if I read it right, this refers to checks that were incomplete at the 3 day point when the delay runs out, and the checks ultimately came back failed - it is my understanding that records are kept on failed checks, though I don't know what kind or how.
I have read that some dealers won't finalize a sale without a positive result, even after the 3 day delay.