Biden's Seven Points - First Three about Background Checks

Alternet 

Vice-President Joe Biden's first detailed remarks about the package of gun control reforms he intends to present next Tuesday to President Obama are solid first steps. 

Speaking Thursday in Washington in between meetings with various gun control constituencies -- from pro-control victims groups and public health physicians on one side to the NRA on the other side -- Biden laid out seven proposals that would more or less reset the federal clock on gun control laws to where it was in 1985, a year before Congress started loosening decades of laws under the Reagan administration and NRA lobbying. Biden repeatedly earned an F rating from the NRA during his tenure in the Senate.  

Here are the seven agenda items, which Biden said had near-unanimous support from gun control groups. 

1) Close the so-called gun show loophole. In 1986, Congress passed a law allowing people to buy a firearm at one of the thousands of gun shows held each year across the country. These sales require no licensing of the gun buyer, no background checks, no waiting periods before getting the gun, no reporting sales to local or federal authorities. Today, 40 percent of gun sales annually across the county occur at gun shows, and by some estimates 80 percent of weapons used in crimes are bought at gun shows.
“There is a surprising—so far—a surprising recurrence of suggestions that we have universal background checks, not just close the gun show loophole but totally universal background checks including private sales,” Biden said. 

2) Universal background checks for gun buyers; and 3) improve background check database. These two proposals are connected and face significant political, technical and legal hurdles. Congress has barred certain groups of people from owning guns for decades, starting with felons in 1934. In 1968, Congress expanded that list to include the mentally ill and drug addicts. In 1993, Congress passed the Brady Bill—named after Ronald Reagan’s press secretary who was shot—which instituted a federal system of background checks for gun buyers, and extended the waiting period to five days before buyers could get their guns. 

The background check system has been in shambles for years, as AlterNet has reported, with three-quarters of the states choosing not to share court information about felons and the mentally ill with federal authorities, and the Supreme Court ruling in 1997 that states didn’t have to comply with the reporting requirement. 

Even though Congress passed a 2007 law creating federally administered grants to states to overcome technical hurdles with sending information to the Justice Department (some states submit information electronically; others infrequently mail a CD) only a dozen states account for most of the data six years after that became law. Biden complained about this non-compliance Thursday. However, the solution doesn’t appear to be a quick fix if past is precedent. 

“It doesn’t do a lot of good when in some states they have a backlog of 40, 50, 60,000 felons that they never registered here,” Biden said. “So we have got to talk about, there is a lot of talk about how we entice, or what is the impediment keeping states from relaying this information.”