Felons, drug addicts, fugitives, traitors, dishonorable dischargees, crazy people, non-immigrants, expatriots, and wife beaters used to go to gun shops and buy guns.
They don't any more. That's good.
Well, except for the fact that it's completely untrue. But hey, let's not let facts get in the way here.
Maybe some of you aren't old enough to remember that there was once a time when you didn't NEED to do these background checks.
This thing has only been in place since 1993. Before then there was no background check required.
The criminal use of firearms was not higher then, nor did criminals buy their guns from licensed dealers more before the background checks were put in place.
This is fairly new stuff and hasn't had a provable impact on crime since it's inception.
Whether it actually helps or not is up to debate if you look at the facts. You would expect, if this system worked, to see a marked decrease in gun crime since the law was put in place. That hasn't really happened.
Remember that the initial Brady Law called for a 5 day waiting period for the background check to be conducted.
The 5 day waiting period went away when the instant check system became available, but several states still have waiting periods.
From looking at the statistics it appears, quite frankly, that the waiting periods do more to prevent crime than the background checks but even that is very slight, and hard to prove.
NICS says they have rejected about 563,000 checks for handgun purchases but they are unable to give reasons for the denials, so it's hard to correlate those rejections to actual crime stats.
The American Medical Association, who are big proponents of gun control, issued a statement on the Brady Law a few years after it was put in place:
"Our analyses provide no evidence that implementation of the Brady Act was associated with a reduction in homicide rates. In particular, we find no differences in homicide or firearm homicide rates to adult victims in the 32 treatment states directly subject to the Brady Act provisions compared with the remaining control states."
Data from FBI Crime report says:
Between 1991 and 1998, without implementing significant gun control legislation (see endnote), California's homicide rate dropped 48.9% versus 31.9% for the rest of the U.S. Likewise, violent crime fell 34.8% in California compared to 23.2% for the rest of the nation. Even choosing a different year to start the comparison, such as 1993 (when the Brady Act was signed) or 1994 (when Brady became effective, February 28, 1994), homicide and violent crime declined faster in California than nationally (FBI Uniform Crime Reports, 1991-1998). Evidence indicates the Brady Act is not a significant factor in violent crime reduction, or as the case of California suggests, neither were any of the gun control measures that were enacted during the 90's.
Some of you need to do a little research before going off of your "feelings" about gun laws.
Facts are much more useful than feelings, and often they don't agree.
The same thing happened with the Clinton Assault Weapon Ban. Congressional reports and research showed that there was no measurable impact on crime from the ban.
In fact, even if you go WAYYYY back to 1968, when guns first really became regulated, the crime statistics don't change much.
Before 1968, when you could order guns from the Sears catalog, the gun crime rate was lower than it is today.
Go read this from the Second Amendment Foundation to see the research.
http://www.saf.org/LawReviews/Zimring68.htm
No gun law has ever been shown to impact gun crime in any meaningful way, since 1934.
Even the 1934 National Firearms Act, outlawing machineguns, has had a questionable impact on crime. Criminal use of machine guns is about as common today as it was pre-1934 except for a very short period of time in Chicago during prohibition. Repealing prohibition actually stopped the gun violence more than outlawing machine guns did.
