Here’s how a Universal Background Check doesn’t work. I bought a gun at a flea market in 1994 and I sell it to Joe Badguy, who then uses it to kill his wife. ATF calls the maker and the trace dead ends five owners ago. If Joe Badguy claims I sold him the gun I say ”There’s no proof I ever touched that gun. He must have me confused with some other guy who used my name to hide his tracks.” Or (and this is how it really works) Joe Badguy never knew my name to begin with.
That's not a UBC, that's a 'universal' NICS check, something presently restricted to Federally-licensed dealers (as they can be said to be engaged in interstate commerce).
The Feebs keep telling us that the NICS system is running "beyond capacity" (because we plebes keep buying arms). That's very much the reason they want POC States to "do their own work" and not tax the NICS, themselves--it reduced the NICS workload.
Do the Feds really do any background checks
For security and similar clearances. Takes about six to eight weeks to be done to an average level of completeness. And needs 6-8 employees, typically Federal, and that's
per investigation.
What NICS actually is, is a list of Prohibited persons, and their
recorded 'permanent' address (when they became Prohibited).
So, an entry looks like: "Person, Very Bad, of 123 Not My Street, Perdition, NIMBY County, East Virginia."
A NICS Query applies your Name, and your Address, and looks for a matching NICS entry.
That's all it does.
Now, if there's also an entry (prohibited people often are "multiple winners") for Person Very, of 123 Not My Street, Perdition, NIMBY County, West Dakota, then, there's a Partial Match. Partial Matches are meant to get a Delay, so that a human can look at the records and try and decide if there's a misspelling, or what. That's complicated, there are around 11 million entries in the NCIS list.*
In some ways, it's a clever thing. Persons '68 GCA create as Prohibited, have generally already lost some of their rights already, to "registering" them is no greater burden upon their liberties than they already have. Mind this requires that we all agree that 68 GCA is a legitimate exercise of the federal government--many of us have strong opinions on that.
Now, looking here:
https://www.fbi.gov/file-repository/nics_firearm_checks_-_day_month_year.pdf/view
We see that there were 69,000 NICS queries in just July of 2023.
Getting even gross numbers of results is (unnecessarily) complicated, but, let's presume 80% were Proceed--those took perhaps 5 minutes per each to process.
It's a ton of work in raw numbers, but not overwhelming when reduced to manhours.
Now, let's say the UBC got its way and there was a full BI on everybody every time. at 8 weeks per each, they would not be finished with the first thousand or so right now. it would bog down to where getting Forms for suppressors are right now (the improved 'right now' not a year ago). There are any number of folk who would suggest that's not a "bug" but a "feature" of such proposals.
Make of that what you will.
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*Note, NICS was implemented in the 80s, using 70s-era software and 60s-era hardware and paper records dating back to WW I. Lore is that the various Prohibited persons records were initially complied on punchcards by government sub-contract data entry companies. Despite FOIA and Congressional Inquiries, what steps were used to verify the accuracy of the data-entry, let alone the records, has yet to be released. We already know that there are several States who have not released any Mental Health info to NICS. That many States only released 80% of their known info. Some estimates are that NICS is only about 50% accurate on it's face. Now, that dire assessment is from misspelings, duplicate information, deceased persons, inaccurate addresses, all the various ills of systems not designed to be audited.
, some will do nothing
, some will eat crayons I suppose (HINT: purple is NOT grape, green is NOT watermelon)AKA, do nothing
