美国国家公共电台 NPR 20 Years On, The Background Check System Continues To Miss Dangerous Gun Buyers（在线收听）

SACHA PFEIFFER, HOST:

Twenty years ago today, President Clinton addressed the nation after 13 people were killed by a gunman at Columbine High School in Colorado.

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BILL CLINTON: Hillary and I are profoundly shocked and saddened by the tragedy today in Littleton, where two students opened fire on their classmates before apparently turning their guns on themselves.

PFEIFFER: Just months before that shooting, the federal government had established a background check system for gun purchases, and the FBI says it has conducted more than 300 million background checks since then. But mass shootings continue to plague the country. NPR's Brakkton Booker reports on some of the shortcomings of the system.

BRAKKTON BOOKER, BYLINE: Back in 1999, President Clinton called the National Instant Background Check System, or NICS for short, a powerful crime-fighting tool.

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CLINTON: Since our new instant criminal background check system went into effect, 100,000 illegal purchases have been stopped by the insta-check system.

BOOKER: It is designed to work quickly, and 20 years later, it still does. A federally licensed gun dealer contacts NICS when someone tries to buy a gun. The dealer is told the purchase is approved or denied. There's also one other possibility - the transaction can be delayed for up to three business days.

LAWRENCE KEANE: If after three business days, and they have not gotten a response one way or the other from NICS, they are permitted by law to transfer the firearm.

BOOKER: That's Lawrence Keane of the National Shooting Sports Foundation. He says the gun transaction can go through even if the FBI hasn't completed the background check in the allotted time frame.

KEANE: Like any database, the system is only as good as the records that are put into the system.

BOOKER: The system relies on a collection of state and federal records, but it's sometimes incomplete. That became clear nearly eight years to the day after the Columbine shooting.

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GEORGE W BUSH: Our nation is shocked and saddened by the news of the shootings at Virginia Tech today.

BOOKER: That shooter would have been denied his gun purchases, but important court documents declaring him a danger to himself never made it into the NICS system. And this wasn't the last time the system failed. In 2017, the shooter in Sutherland Springs, Texas, should not have been able to obtain a weapon. He went on to kill 27 people, including himself. A few years before that, there was another system failure in Charleston, S.C.

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BARACK OBAMA: I've had to make statements like this too many times. Communities like this have had to endure tragedies like this too many times. We don't have all the facts, but we do know that once again, innocent people were killed, in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun.

BOOKER: In that shooting, nine black churchgoers were killed by a white supremacist. It was Stephen Morris who oversaw the FBI background check division at the time of the Charleston shooting.

STEPHEN MORRIS: Generally, the weaknesses of the NICS system are talked about mostly in the wake of a tragic shooting, which seems to be more often than not.

BOOKER: In the Charleston case, the FBI delayed the gun transaction. But because of poor communications between federal and state authorities, the background check wasn't resolved in three business days. So the gun purchase went through in what's called a default proceed. It was later discovered the shooter previously admitted to possessing a controlled substance, and that would have triggered a deny for the handgun.

Over the years, the FBI says it's denied some 1.3 million gun transfers. But Morris says, even with tweaks to the system, lawmakers haven't done enough to ease the strain on federal investigators.

MORRIS: The one area that legislators - Congress, specifically - could release some of that pressure is extending that deadline.

BOOKER: It's not just the crunch to conduct a search in three business days. It's also the sheer volume of checks. The FBI says it's conducted more than 300 million background checks, including 26 million just last year. Again, Stephen Morris.

MORRIS: We're talking about a system and a process that was created over 20 years ago. It goes without saying that the system is stressed out.

BOOKER: In addition to the system being stressed out, Morris says it's also limited, unable to catch thousands of other firearms transactions, legal and illegal, that wouldn't trigger the NICS system, like in Parkland, Fla.

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PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: A school filled with innocent children and caring teachers became the scene of terrible violence, hatred and evil.

BOOKER: Intent - it's one more thing NICS can't detect. So once a gun is purchased, the background check system no longer provides a safeguard.

Brakkton Booker, NPR News.

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