The Republican Congress should not let a bipartisan gun bill – co-sponsored by Sen. Bob Corker, R-Tenn., and backed by the National Rifle Association (NRA) – slip away.
The bill does not create a new right for gun owners – or take one away – but seeks to strengthen current law by assisting states and federal agencies to enter data such as criminal and domestic violence convictions in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) for gun purchases.
It is meant to flag gun owners such as Devin Kelley, the 26-year-old who shot and killed 26 and injured 20 others at a Sutherland Springs, Texas, church on Nov. 5 but whose Air Force domestic violence conviction should have prevented him from purchasing a gun. However, Kelley’s conviction was never recorded, so he was able to pass a background check and qualify for the firearm.
The Fix NICS Act incentivizes compliance with the law, increasing the chances that states and agencies will follow through with proper paperwork and allow the already-in-place law to prevent more people from such horrific acts of violence. It requires the state and agencies to develop plans within one year to ensure compliance and reporting of proper records.
However, earlier this month, the U.S. House merged the bipartisan bill with another one, the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act, that would force states to honor all other states’ laws in allowing those with concealed carry permits to go armed. Critics say that would allow permit holders in states with lax laws who are domestic abusers, lack gun safety training or who have otherwise dangerous histories wider latitude while carrying in states with tougher laws.
For instance, 19 states do not require any gun safety training to be a concealed gun toter, and 12 states do not require a permit or background check.
While the House passed the merged bill 231-198, with the support of six Democrats, the Senate still has separate bills. Sen. John Cornyn R-Texas, sponsored both, and doesn’t want to see them combined. While the concealed carry legislation is not likely to be voted on until spring, he believes the Fix NICS Act can get the 60 votes to pass and pass before the end of the year.
“I think it’s a mistake to try to combine [the concealed carry measure] with the Fix NICS background check,” he said. “We have good bipartisan support for that. But if we start trying to add other things to it, then I think we risk not doing anything, which has sort of been the fate of a lot of the legislation we’ve tried in the past. So, I’d like to do the Fix NICS, and then we can move on from there.”
Indeed, while the Fix NICS bill would have to go back before the House, passing it would be a feather in the cap for the battered Republican Congress, which failed to pass repeal and replacement of the failing Affordable Care Act and has yet to complete a promised tax proposal.
The NRA, which backs both bills, said it applauded Cornyn’s “efforts to ensure the records of prohibited individuals are entered into NICS, while providing a relief valve for those who are wrongly included in the system.”
The gun rights organization, Chris Cox, the organization’s Institute for Legislative Action executive director, said in a news release, “has long supported the inclusion of all legitimate records in the [NICS].”
Corker had received encouragement to support the bill during a November meeting with a Chattanooga clergy group.
“I have long supported improving how our background check system operates,” he said in an emailed statement to the Times Free Press, “while at the same time ensuring that Second Amendment rights are not infringed upon. The Fix NICS Act meets that test, and I am proud to be a co-sponsor of this important piece of legislation.”
We would like to believe that such could be the tone of future legislation involving guns – that a broad database like the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, which has prevented 1.3 million weapon purchases since being launched in 1998, could be tightened in such finite ways that it could prevent rare future acts like that of Devin Kelley.
Let’s face it. Gun owners do not want to give up their guns, and the Second Amendment has been widely read as allowing them to have them. Any legislation that smacks of gun control – of taking guns away from owners, or preventing the average person from getting one – is, at present, poison. Such measures are not going to pass.
But if legislation is carefully crafted, little by little, on the front end to prevent individuals who might misuse their firearms from doing so, or tightens current law that might enhance enforcement, we can know we are doing what is presently possible to keep unthinkable acts of human mass destruction from occurring.