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Trump’s New FBI Director Will Inherit a Gun Background-Check System Marred by Missing Records and Ma
A few weeks after a a gunman murdered nine members of a prayer group at a historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina, the then-director of the FBI acknowledged that a cascade of errors within the federal gun background-check system had allowed the shooter to erroneously purchase the weapon he used in the act.
Dylann Roof, a white supremacist with a criminal record, had been allowed to walk out of a gun store with a .45-caliber Glock pistol because his background check had taken longer than three business days to process. This is known as a default proceed sale. Because of poor record-keeping practices by a local police department, the FBI examiners missed that Roof had confessed to using drugs during an arrest, a disqualification from gun ownership, according to James Comey, the bureau’s director.
“What we can do is make sure that we learn from it, get better, and work to ensure that we catch everything,” Comey said in a statement on July 10, 2015.
Comey is gone, ousted by President Trump in an act of high political trauma, but the failures exposed by the horrific event persist. Since it launched in 1998, the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, or NICS, has completed almost 262 million checks. The system screens buyers in all gun purchases and transfers at federally licensed stores across the country, as well as applicants for concealed-carry permits. It’s an unsexy but essential part of the FBI’s job, a first line of defense against criminals getting hold of deadly weapons.
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