Federal authorities requested to take back guns from thousands of people who did not pass the national background check. Those people had criminal records, mental health issues and other problems that should have disqualified them, USA Today reports.
FBI’s National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) shows that 4,170 retrieval orders have been issued last year and that is the largest number in the last ten years. Agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) are the ones who are supposed to collect the weapons after the FBI issues a gun retrieval request.
Every year NICS vets millions of gun purchase transactions, but the number of seizure requests highlights the problems in the system where analysts must complete background checks within only three days and if the check is not complete in that period, the federal law allows the sale to go forward. If the FBI later finds that the sale should have been denied, it asks ATF agents to take back the weapon. The agents are also exposed to potentially dangerous confrontations.
“These are people who shouldn’t have weapons in the first place, and it just takes one to do something that could have tragic consequences. You don’t want ATF to stand for ‘after the fact,” says David Chipman, a former ATF official who helped oversee the firearm retrieval program.
The number of successfully executed requests is not known, as well as the number of recovered weapons and because multiple weapons can be purchased in one transaction, the number of guns that should have been banned could be very high. Of 125 transactions examined between 2008 and 2014, approximately 93 percent of the weapons were recovered.
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