How Guns Get Into The Wrong Hands
Under the so-called Brady Law, efforts have been made to reduce gun violence nationwide through background checks on gun buyers.
But as CBS News Correspondent Maureen Maher reports, criminals can still get guns because of loopholes in the law. But closing those loopholes is easier said than done.
Every time a gun is purchased from a dealer in the United States, the government's instant check system is put to the test.
Ninety-eight percent of the time, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) determines whether the buyer meets the requirments for the purchase within a three-day limit prescribed by law. When the government goes past this time limit, the gun can then be sold.
Since January, some 1,800 people who are legally ineligible to buy a gun—including felons, fugitives, the mentally ill and stalkers—have slipped through the cracks, and walked out of a store armed with a weapon.
The biggest reason is smaller cities that can not or do not keep up with the records, according to the Justice Department.
Justice Department gun policy expert Bea Witzleben says, "There are of course, small jurisdictions which have financial constraints of them which don't permit them to move as quickly as we might like under current law."
Concerned the system is not on target, the Senate is considering a bill that would give the FBI more time to investigate and local law enforcement more help to update records.
Bill sponsor Senator Dick Durbin, D-Ill., says, "I think it's an additional safeguard so that those who buy guns are not going to misuse them."
But the National Rifle Association argues more time would only mean a waste of more taxpayer money.
The NRA’s James Bay Baker says, "You can do the same kind of check you can do in the 15 minutes as you can in 15 days. It's a question of whether those records are in the system."
Three young sisters—Leslie, Katheryn and Rebecca Gonzales—were murdered in suburban Denver last summer by their father. He shot them with a gun he had just bought, despite a restraining order filed against him.
In response, Colorado legislatures recently voted to join a growing number of states that choose to run the instant checks themselves instead of allowing the FBI to do it. Simon Gonzales, the gunman, could never have bought a gun if a system with access to more local records had been used.
While Washington lawmakers and lobbyists fire off parting shots as to who's to blame and how to fix it, more than a dozen states across the country have decided to set up their own line of defense.
The three little girls have become an example of just how big a problem still exists with this system. No matter how much time or money is spent, there seems to be no easy solution.