Background checks: Proof that they work?

During last year’s battle over gun control, the pro-gun side didn’t just “passionately invoke the Second Amendment,” said Nora Caplan-Bricker in NewRepublic.com. “They claimed that gun control doesn’t work.” That was the main excuse of congressional Republicans when they killed a popular background check measure after the devastating Sandy Hook massacre. A new gun violence study shows how misguided they were, said the Chicago Sun-Times in an editorial. Researchers at the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research found that since Missouri removed background checks in 2007, the murder rate there jumped 16 percent—about 60 additional murders every year. This spike occurred while the national murder rate was declining 5 percent. Why did gun enthusiasts demand the repeal of the “permit-to-purchase” law, which required purchasers to pass a criminal and mental health background check? To make it easier to buy guns and save purchasers a $10 fee. That it did, at the expense of causing “a lot of needless deaths.”

Don’t blame those deaths on the repeal of the background check law, said John Lott in FoxNews.com. “Missouri was on an ominous path before the law was ended,” and the state’s murder rate had increased by 32 percent over the previous five years. If anything, getting rid of permit-to-purchase “slowed the growth rate in murders”—probably because it encouraged law-abiding citizens to obtain firearms to defend themselves against criminals. There’s “ample research across all the states” showing that background checks do not reduce murder rates. Gun control advocates, however, would rather “cherry-pick” a study from the one state that confirms their preconceptions.

“Gun control laws aren’t a plot to harass law-abiding gun owners,” said The Baltimore Sun. They’re a means of keeping “deadly weapons out of the wrong hands.” Since Missouri ended background checks, there’s been a boom in “so-called straw purchasers”—people who buy guns for criminals. The Missouri study “makes the strongest case yet for background checks,” said Danielle Wiener-Bronner in TheWire.com, but don’t expect anything to change. Though 89 percent of Americans and 84 percent of gun owners support background checks, the gun lobby continues to intimidate elected officials. “Between moneyed interests and a vocal minority, a research study doesn’t stand a chance.”

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