Opinion: Permit-to-purchase gun laws beat universal background checks

Logan Ramsey

Editor-in-Chief

The House of Representatives recently passed the Bipartisan Background Checks Act and as an advocate of gun control you would think I would be in support of this legislation, but I’m not. If I didn’t know better, I would be ecstatic at this news but the issue is that this legislation will be ineffective on its own and will represent gun control poorly when it doesn’t work.

Luckily I don’t think I really have to worry about it. The legislation aims to require universal background checks on all gun sales and it’s the most sweeping gun legislation proposed in decades, but it faces considerable resistance when it reaches the floor of the Republican controlled house and the President who has said that he’ll veto it if it ever reaches his desk.

The reason why I can’t support this legislation is because of something you may not have heard of before, permit-to-purchase gun laws. While universal background checks are one of the most well-known common sense gun policies, the conversation neglects a key component to making a sizable dent in gun violence.

A permit-to-purchase gun policy is a law that has been passed in other states such as Connecticut and Missouri and requires a prospective gun buyer to go to their local law enforcement station and apply for a permit to own a firearm. The process could take about a week while police conduct their own background check on you.

This firearm policy is key to curbing gun violence, and universal background checks on their own won’t solve the problem. A 2018 study done by researchers with the Center for Gun Policy and Research found that in states that only required background checks and not other licensing requirements were associated with a 16 percent increase in gun violence over the course of the study, and they found that large urban areas that had permit-to-purchase laws in place were associated with a 14 percent reduction in firearm homicide.

The reason for this is that local law enforcement has more access to legal documents and can run more comprehensive background checks then the National Instant Criminal Background Check System can do, which is the status quo background check system. The problem with this system is that it relies on states and other government entities to keep the database up to date and report criminal records, but they aren’t very good at that right now. A 2013 report by the National Consortium for Justice Information and Statistics estimated that 7 million records are missing from the database, meaning that 25 percent of felony convictions aren’t available to the system that’s severely under-equipped to handle the gun violence epidemic.

The best thing about all of this? The study definitely found that there was no increase in homicide in any other forms other than by firearm. So when guns were taken from the hands of criminals they didn’t just find another way to kill people, it reduced homicide across the board.

Missouri repealed its permit-to-purchase laws in 2007, and they immediately felt the consequences of those actions. One year after that repeal, crime gun tracing showed that more guns were being passed into the hands of criminals. Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research found that in six years after the state repealed purchase permits, the firearm homicide rate rose by 18% while the national average declined by 11%.

Just because the government passes a law requiring universal background checks doesn’t mean that the national database will be updated, and that’s because it’s too large of a system to manage, too much slips through the cracks. Hence, why we need a national permit-to-purchase law put in place, that would work the same way on the state level. Local law enforcement handles the background checks because they have more access to records on the people applying for a permit.

This policy is backed by strong evidence and could be even better on the national level, because then criminals wouldn’t be able to jump state lines to somewhere with relaxed gun laws while the legislation the house passed is centered around universal background checks, which haven’t worked in the past.

I fear the consequences of this legislation passing would be “evidence” that the right side of the aisle could use as to how gun control doesn’t work when implemented, as they further ignore the real policies that work.

(Editor’s note: This article had an error when it was first published. Missouri repealed its permit-to-purchase, not Mississippi.)