The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act

The Brady Act
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Contents TOC \o "1-3" \h \z \u Introduction PAGEREF _Toc487664375 \h 3Critique PAGEREF _Toc487664376 \h 3Analysis PAGEREF _Toc487664377 \h 7Conclusion PAGEREF _Toc487664378 \h 14
The Brady Act
Introduction
The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act (to be referred to from now on as the Brady Act for brevity) came into being in its final form in late 1993, as a corollary to the initial acts surrounding gun violence prevention during 1968. It is a law which made background checks mandatory for all firearms purchased within the United States borders, along with also creating a mandatory five day waiting period between application and approval.
Originally, the Brady Act was brought into the House of Representatives by Charles Schumer early in 1991, but the concept was never brought to a vote, and so it was dropped for a while. Schumer again attempted to bring the Act to a vote in early 1993 – the Act was discussed and voted on throughout the year, and was eventually signed into law by President Clinton on November the thirtieth. The Act retained its name from the Press Secretary to Ronald Reagan, who was shot in the head during an attempted assassination of the president, leaving him partially paralysed for the rest of his life. The attack also say Tim McCarty of the Secret Service and Thomas Delehanty (police officer with the district police) injured.
This paper will be divided into two main parts – in the first part, the case study itself will be analysed and critiqued, showing readers what it actually means. In the second part, the article will be discussed in terms of other literature which shows the impact that the Brady Act has or has not had, with an even spread of literature for both sides of the argument. Finally, the conclusion will sum up everything that has been said, with a final discussion of whether or not the Brady Act was ultimately successful.
Critique
The case study which is to be analysed within this paper is concerned with an action plan of why the Brady Act is necessary in the first place.
The interim provisions of the Act required that licensed firearms dealers request a presale check on any potential handgun purchasers from the Chief Law Enforcement Officer. (Case Study)
The Act itself was brought in for the purpose of reducing violence perpetuated by handguns, as we have seen. However, there was a lot of controversy surrounding the Act, and how it would be enforced, especially considering America had the right to bear arms enshrined in its very Constitution (albeit as an amendment rather than a part of the initial work (Legal Information Institute)). The need to restrain certain aspects of firearms was naturally something which clashed with the Constitution, necessitating careful planning. As the case study points out, without the in-depth discussion which took place, it would have been very difficult to get state compliance with the new ideas.
The case study lays out the qualifications which would prohibit someone from holding a firearm permit or firearm itself. These qualifications are quite extensive, and also necessary if background checks are to truly be effective. While most of the qualifications do look to make sense, since they all involve some form of illegal doings, the qualification that anybody buying a gun be a US citizen naturally seems a little out of place. I believe that this qualification exists for two reasons: one, so that firearm dealers do not run into problems by selling firearms to people who come from countries with strict gun laws (i.e. the UK, Australia, Japan…); and also to elucidate the background process – if someone is not a registered citizen, it becomes much harder to make proper checks into whether or not someone is fit to carry a firearm.
The interim provisions which are stated above are there because the new law required new methods of both prosecution and checking to be devised and put into place. Naturally, such a change to the Laws requires a huge change in both sales and how the judiciary is handled; without the interim provisions, dealers and the judicial forces would be unable to cope with such huge changes.
The Brady Act regulates the sale of handguns and thus directly regulates commerce. It is an amendment to a comprehensive federal scheme for the regulation of firearms sales that unquestionably affect interstate commerce. (Lectlaw.com)
Some of the controversy surrounding the Act is the changes it will necessarily cause to the industry – there is a chance that gun sales will be adversely affected by this new legislation, even if the initial switch-over goes smoothly.
The interim period for the Brady Act lasted until 1998 (Identify Barriers to Change), when the Act itself would become law, and need to be followed. It was thought that this time period would enable everybody to familiarise themselves with the new legislation and formulate the channels of communication with local law enforcement and other agencies which they would require when running background checks. There were, of course, many problems with the new Act, not the least of which was the necessity of creating these channels in the first place. As (Identify Barriers to Change) shows, there would have been a lot involved in the changeover from the norm before the Brady Act was brought into play, and after. This would have necessitated changes which some dealers and shops may not have been able to properly handle as they were; the five day waiting period, for example, is something which will almost inevitably change the way in which profits flow through the business.
A five day waiting period will not only change the way in which someone handles the cash flow of their business, but it can also affect the way they deal with customers. Having a waiting period is something which is possibly designed to allow people to rethink their purchases, as well as giving the dealer time to properly run the background check. Unfortunately, while having backgrounds checks is useful, the time period between having to pay for a firearm and actually receiving may be long enough for people to re-evaluate the purchase, and so cancel the transaction. Even one cancelled transaction can be detrimental to cash flow, but if they build up in number, then the resulting imbalance may be more than any one dealer can tolerate, leading to them going out of business.
A major barrier to the Brady Act in its original conception as something which was designed to lower violence perpetuated by guns was the Supreme Court ruling in 1997 that they could not force individual states to comply with the ruling (Case Study). This had the effect of de-fanging the Brady Act as it was ultimately meant, as not having background checks would mean that anybody could buy a handgun, as it had been before. Interestingly, the five-day waiting period was deemed constitutional, even if the background check was not.
Federally licensed firearms importers, manufacturers, and dealers must comply with the Brady Law prior to the transfer of any firearm to a nonlicensed individual. (Case Study)
Ultimately, however, the Brady Act seems as if it would only work if the full Act was enabled throughout the country – having a waiting period but no background checks hurts everyone except for the person who is trying to purchase a firearm. Yes, it is true that the customer does not end up with a gun, but they at least are reimbursed; the dealer does not receive money, so he ultimately loses, and if the purchase goes through without a background check, that leaves everyone potentially much less safe, as there is no way of knowing whether someone is going to use the gun in an illegal way.
Of course, this is not to say that the Brady Act would necessarily always help in this regard, and it is discriminatory to act as though this is the case. The Brady Act may screen out people who are legitimately trying to get hold of a gun for target shooting, hunting, re-enacting (even though technically the Brady Act does not cover firearms which are listed as antiques (Case Study)), while allowing the purchase of guns by people who may have had a clean record up until that point, but have simply been biding their time until they have the funds and other accoutrements necessary for purchasing a firearm, at which point they will begin committing crimes with the aid of a deadly weapon. Another idea the Brady Act does not encompass is the idea that someone who has been completely law-abiding up until that point, but has somehow been pushed beyond the point of no return: the Brady Act does not preclude him or her from purchasing a firearm.
Analysis
The main point of analysis which needs to be discussed is whether or not we think the Brady Act was successful in what it set out to do. The Brady Act was put in place as an updating of the original act in 1968, called the Gun Control Act. The Gun Control Act was something which focused primarily on interstate commerce in firearms, hoping to regulate it and therefore control the movement of firearms to some extent. The Brady Act was designed to be incorporated with this act, but extend it in the manner which has been discussed: to provide background checks, and to give a five day waiting period between someone purchasing a gun, and them receiving it.
Overall, there is evidence to suggest that the Brady Act has been successful in what it set out to do. Firearm homicides peaked in 1993 (Fuller, 2014), and have been dropping since then. Further discussion of how this actually breaks down is below, but for now the initial statistic is enough. The drop in homicides is something which the Brady Act was created to oppose, so from that statistic alone, we can surmise that it worked – homicides are down presumably either because there is better education surrounding guns, or because the Act is working to keep guns away from people who would misuse them. This simple fact alone is something which should be taken into consideration when any discussion of the Act takes place, though of course the fact that many people already own guns which they did not have to go through a background check to purchase is something which we should keep in mind.
Looking further into the statistics which show dropping gun crime, we can separate them into three different areas: homicides, suicides, and gun injuries which do not lead to death. While the homicide rate is not too different in Brady Act states (Duke Today Staff, 2000), something which could be attributed either to a failure of the Act itself or to a general rise in unlicensed dealers, the rate itself has gone down. This shows that something is happening within the US to change the way in which guns are related to or handled, regardless of the Act’s involvement. One metric which shows more encouraging news for the Act is that of suicides: we know that states which have enacted the Brady Act with its waiting period have seen a decrease in suicides over the parts year since it was enacted (Duke Today Staff, 2000).
It has been theorised that, while the Act has procedures in place to keep people with known mental health issues away from guns (Case Study), what is in fact lowering the suicide rate in states which use the Brady Act for handling licensed dealers is the waiting period. Although the initial period of waiting was phased out in 1998 with the introduction of NCIS (Case Study), there is still some time to wait.
background checks blocked more than 2.4 million prohibited purchasers like domestic abusers, convicted felons, mentally ill persons (emphasis mine), and other...