Oh look, the clearly mentally disturbed white supremacist considered dangerous even by his own family was still able to get a gun. Oh my goodness, the other white supremacist currently awaiting trial on drug charges was able to walk into a gun store and pick his favorite murder weapon because, oops, it turns out we don't quite track these things the way we're supposed to.
Let's all act surprised yet a'freakin-gain, together.
As these two cases show, the one system that gun rights and gun control advocates both agree on, the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, which is supposed to keep guns out of the hands of dangerous people, is riddled with problems.
And that doesn't even account for the fact that you can "privately" sell a gun to whoever you damn well want, no background check at all, because the NRA considers anything less than that to be a terrible infringement on prospective mass murderers everywhere. But all right then, why doesn't the background check system work like it is supposed to? What's that? Because there's plenty of states that do not give a particular damn?
Some states have highly automated record-keeping, while others have more room for human error and some still work with paper records; some scour old cases for names to add, but most do not bother; and the states use varying standards for committing people to mental hospitals against their will. [...]
Other states have complained about the cost of keeping up the records, and even states with policies of sharing the names with the federal database vary widely in how aggressively they do so. Georgia has reported fewer than 9,000 people over the years; Virginia, with a smaller population, has reported more than 231,000.
None of this is particularly surprisingly, and none of it can be easily fixed so long as the cornerstone of American gun policy—that everyone has an inherent right to the sort of weaponry that can easily take out a school classroom or midsized movie theater, because that's what being a true "American" means—remains the guiding principle of the states. The NRA says we can't have any new gun laws, we need to just "enforce" the ones that are conspicuously not working now. The more permissive states have no interest in "enforcing" the current laws with more rigor because nobody is keen on spending a bucketload of money toward "fixes" that the NRA would immediately seize on as evidence of tyranny anyway. There is currently no legal way to keep a potentially violent, clearly disturbed or terrorism-inclined American from getting a gun, or twelve guns, or a basement full of guns and a tractor-trailer full of ammo, because doing so would strongly inconvenience the other, supposedly far saner Americans who
also need to keep a dozen guns and a metric ton of ammunition in case they find themselves suddenly having to defend their town from zombies, space aliens, or "the knockout game."
Yes, I know, we're supposed to be looking here for some constructive way to repair the background check system so that the crazy violent nutcases can't either skate through or simply go to a seller who will ignore it entirely. I've got nothing. If someone wants to enlighten us on a fix to the system that wouldn't result in an Exorcist-style pea soup headspin from the NRA if actually implemented, or alternatively if someone wants to take this opportunity to again sanctimoniously preach about how there's just simply a certain number of school kids and movie patrons and random women on the street who wouldn't date some loser that are going to have to get their brains blown out each year in order to Keep America Great, you go ahead and have fun with that.