PA Bill Number: HB1472
Title: In primary and election expenses, further providing for reporting by candidate and political committees and other persons and for late contributions ...
Description: In primary and election expenses, further providing for reporting by candidate and political committees and other persons and for late contrib ...
Last Action: Referred to STATE GOVERNMENT
Last Action Date: Apr 22, 2024
Instant Background Check System Fails to Keep Guns from Mentally Ill :: 08/19/2014
While the National Instant Criminal Background Check System remains the only square inch of compromise between the nation's divided gun camps, the costly federal program is failing to keep guns away from the dangerously mentally ill.
The White House describes the background check system, also known as NICS, as its "most important tool" to stopping gun crime. But more than a decade of data from the FBI and public health research reveals broad failings of the system, which has cost at least $650 million to maintain, a News21 investigation found.
Nearly all sides of the gun debate have devoted resources to strengthening the background check system, confronting technology gaps, coordination failures and privacy concerns.
Thirty states have passed laws mandating mental health reporting to NICS, four of which were added in the last six months. Yet no organization has been able to address the larger concern that NICS is poorly designed to identify those in society most likely to be violent.
"It's really casting a very wide net to try to find a few people, which is largely an impossible task," said Dr. Michael Norko, head of forensics at the Connecticut Department of Mental Health and Addiction Services. "It's not really a good public health measure. We really need to find a better way of doing this."
Federally licensed gun dealers are required to conduct a background check, either online or by phone, before each firearms sale. Within about 30 seconds, the system searches for prior criminal convictions and in 38 states a history of severe mental illness as judged by a court.
But states are not required under federal law to submit mental health records to NICS. There are no consequences, financial or otherwise, if states choose not to send records, resulting in a national record-keeping system that is riddled with information gaps.
Millions of people who have been forced into hospitals for mental health issues are left out of the system. Only about 30 percent of the 4.4 million estimated mental health records in the U.S. over the last two decades can be found in NICS, according to research compiled in 2012 by the National Consortium for Justice Information and Statistics and the National Center for State Courts.
Those whose names are found in the system are unlikely to try to buy a gun. Out of all gun purchases blocked by the FBI over the last 16 years, fewer than 2 percent were because of mental health status. That amounts to 14,613 blocked sales since 1998.
The files are costly to locate and store, according to interviews with officials from 10 different states. Mental health records can be kept in courthouses, private hospitals and state health facilities across each state. There were 2,083 agencies responsible for providing information for background checks across the country in 2010, including courts, state health departments and psychiatric hospitals, according to the most recent Bureau of Justice Statistics report.
The system is also vastly overinclusive, six public health experts said in interviews.
