February 20, 2019 • 19 mins
We were waiting for it… and now it happened. California along with 15 other states have filed a lawsuit against President Trump’s emergency declaration over border wall funds. The lawsuit argues that the president used the pretext of a manufactured crisis to declare a national crisis. The lawsuit will make its way through the 9th Circuit which has ruled against him on various other legal challenges. Jeremy White, reporter for Politico, joins us to set up this legal fight.
Next, after last week’s shooting in Aurora Illinois, one of the first questions that pops up is, did the suspect own the gun legally? In that case, he passed the background check and got his gun, but he never should have passed that background check. He had a prior felony conviction in another state. This is a problem that arises in cases all across the country, people getting guns when they shouldn’t. There is a law on the books that a gun sale can proceed after three days, even if the background check isn’t completed. Zusha Elinson, reporter for the WSJ, joins us to talk about how many banned buyers get guns and what the ATF has to do to get them back.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
It's Wednesday, February. I'm Oscar Ramirez in Los Angeles, and
this is the Daily Dive. We were waiting for it,
and now it happened. California, along with fifteen other states,
have filed a lawsuit against President Trump's emergency declaration over
border wall funds. The lawsuit argues that the president used
(00:23):
the pretext of a manufactured crisis to declare a national emergency.
The lawsuit will make its way through the Ninth Circuit,
which has ruled against him on various other legal challenges.
Jeremy White, reporter for Politico, joins us to set up
this legal fight next. After last week's shooting in Aurora, Illinois,
one of the first questions that pops up is did
(00:44):
the suspect own the gun legally? In that case, he
passed the background check and got his gun, But he
never should have passed that background check. He had a
prior felony conviction in another state. This is a problem
that arises in cases all across the country, people getting
guns when they shouldn't. There's a on the books that
says a gun sale can proceed after three days even
if the background check isn't completed. Zusha Ellenson, reporter for
(01:07):
the Wall Street Journal, joins us to talk about how
many band buyers get guns and what the a t
F has to do to get them back. It's news
without the noise. Let's dive in and we will have
a national emergency and we will then be sued, and
they will sue us in the Ninth Circuit even though
it shouldn't be there, and we will possibly get a
(01:29):
bad ruling, and then we'll get another bad ruling, and
then we'll end up in the Supreme Court, and hopefully
we'll get a fair shake and we'll win in the
Supreme Court. Joining us now is Jeremy White, California politics
reporter for Politico. So we were waiting for this the
legal objections to President Trump's National Emergency at the border.
California is leading sixteen states in a lawsuit against this
(01:52):
emergency declaration. The Attorney General Javier Basrah announced it on Monday.
What do we know about this complaint? This is now
the third set of lawsuits, and we'll get to that
in a minute. But what is this specific complaints? Say? Well,
the central argument in this complaint, which California filed along
with fifteen other states, is essentially that these states would
suffer real harm from this emergency declaration, both from the
(02:16):
loss of a lot of federal funds that would be
diverted to build the wall, and then in the case
of California, New Mexico, the two border states in the lawsuit,
there's an additional argument that the wall construction would inflict
pretty wide ranging environment damage. All of these states have
democratic attorneys general, but one of these states does. All
(02:36):
of but one of these states have a democratic governors
as well. I think Maryland is the only one that doesn't.
I did have a question because I know, I guess
the states along the border would be mostly impacted. Everybody
else is just kind of signing onto this saying that
we agree with them, even though they have no specific
skin in the game there. Well, as I said, I
think all of these states stand to lose of money.
(02:57):
There's millions of dollars of state here, so you could
certainly make the argument that some states might have more
to loose than others. Again, the border states might actually
have a physical barrier within their territory could arguably see
a larger impact. But you know the argument of that
all of these states are going to see some form
of loss of funds at least, and I guess it
depends where they choose to take the money away from
(03:19):
to actually allocate there to the border a little more
into the complain, all of these states are basically saying, yeah,
there could be some irreparable environmental damage. But a lot
of this plays out kind of like a lot of
the talking points that we've seen going around in the
discussion leading up to this, basically things that the President
is manufacturing a crisis. The border crossings are down, it's
(03:40):
mostly asylum seekers that are getting to ports of entries,
So a lot of this is kind of take down
in a political sense, and that's a lot of how
they're structuring it. They're even using his own words against
him when he said he didn't need to do this, certainly,
and I think everybody who was watching that press conference,
particularly the people like California Attorney General Javier B. Sara,
(04:02):
sat up and took notice when the President said that,
and sort of I think a lot of them saw
that as laying out their legal case for them. Javier B.
Sarah said in a press conference that day repeatedly that
the President had already said he didn't have to do it,
and indeed the lawsuit cited those words, and also, as
it's becoming kind of a computer de trump Era cites
(04:22):
a lot of tweets from the President in addition to
public statements about how he was turned to build the
lall for years and years, sort of laying out the
case that he was going to attempt to do this
regardless of whether there was merit to his claim of
an emergency existing. And as you said, I think the
arguments in this lawsuit by and large track some of
(04:44):
the political debate we've seen. This lawsuit also builds on
California's record of defying the administration. They've have also a
number of fights with the administration. This is also going
to be set up in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals,
which the President specifically is called out a number of
times saying, you know, even in that press conference that
we were talking about, he said, Hey, this is gonna
(05:05):
get filed there. We're gonna lose, We're gonna go back
and forth, and eventually it's gonna go back to the
Supreme Court and talk to us a little bit about
the troubles that the president has had with the Ninth
Circuit nothing knew that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals
is seen as a more liberal court that tends to
side with more liberal arguments for plaintiffs. And as you
point out, California has filed coming on fifty lawsuits against
(05:27):
the Trump administration. So there's certainly been plenty of action
in the Ninth Circuit. And I think it obviously remains
to be seen where the courts end up on this one,
but the President certainly made sure in his response to
mention the Ninth Circuit right away. Looking at the larger context,
the President literally is thinking about the political implications of
(05:50):
this emergency declaration and of sort of showing his supporters
that he is willing to take the site of action
to build this wall. I think in the same way,
he's sort of signaling to his supporters it's us against
the system that's stacked against us by liberals. Right. Yeah,
he called the Democrats the radical left. Obviously, he did
mention the Ninth Circuit, and he also called California for
(06:12):
their high speed rail train project that got half canceled.
I guess he said that, you know, they're out of
control with their fast train and there's no hope of completion.
They seem to be in charge of this whole mess also,
so just kind of continuing to hit on them when
we're looking at timeline. Now, how long is this part
of the process going to take. I can't say that
for sure, but I think it's fair to say that
(06:34):
we are going to see a lengthy legal process that
is likely going to be an appealed to the Supreme Court.
We've seen that, we had several of the issues in
which California has challenged the Trump administration bannd on visitors
from majority Muslim countries. There's a lawsuit about asking about
immigration of the U. S. Census. Supreme Court is going
(06:55):
to take a look at. So I think this fits
into a larger pattern of Trump attempting to carry out
his agenda in California, being among the leaders that says,
let's put this to the constitutional test, yep, and now
it's time to wait, let's see what the judges say,
and then, as the President did already allude to, that's
the next level appeal and go back and forth for
(07:16):
a little while. Jeremy White, California politics reporter for Politico,
Thank you very much for joining us. Thanks so much
for having me guys, A t F agents had to
track down guns sold to more than six thousand people
(07:37):
who are identified after the fact as being legally banned
from buying them. The National Instant Criminal Background System, or
n i c S, is supposed to prevent that. The
FBI's background check system denied more than a hundred thousand
gun transactions in but according to federal data and interviews
with law enforcement officials, their holes in the system and
(08:00):
a crush of background requests and that's undermining the government's
ability to keep guns out of the hands of the
wrong people. Joining us now is Zusha Ellenson, reporter for
The Wall Street Journal covering guns, cops, and crime. You
guys had a very interesting story about how the a
t F retrieves guns from band buyers. These are people
(08:20):
who have bought guns and then later on it turns
out that they should not have had these guns, and
the process that they go through to get those things back.
Last week, we just had a workplace shooting in Illinois
where the gunman killed five people. He had a gun legally,
but we found out later This is the first question
(08:40):
that everybody always asks, is he's supposed to have this gun?
We found out he wasn't supposed to actually have this,
but he went through the process. They did give him
the gun, and then it was something that he didn't
disclose that allowed him to get this. Let's talk about
that first and then we'll get into the a t
F So an excellent point. After every one of these
mats shootings, right, the first thing people want to know,
should this guy have been able to own a gun?
(09:02):
As everyone knows, there's laws about who can own a
gun in this country. If you have a past felony,
if you've been committed to say, a mental asylum, as
you've had other legal troubles, you're not allowed to own
a gun. And it turns out this guy, Gary Martin,
who shot up his former workplace outside of Chicago. There
he had a past felony, a conviction for felony assault
back in which should have prohibited from him from ever
(09:24):
buying a gun, But somehow he slipped through the state
background check system there in Illinois and was able to
purchase a gun. Now, Illinois is one of thirteen states
that does their own background checks. The rest of the
country mainly relies on the FBI, so the state does
their own background checks. They did an initial check on
him that missed his old felony. He gets his little
(09:45):
firearms card, he buys the gun, They light her, find
out he has this old felony. By then it's too late.
They asked him to turn it in. He doesn't turn
it in and they don't go to see it. So
he keeps the same Smith and Western handgun that he
used in the horrific attack of last week, just because
the background check system didn't catch him in Illinois, and
in this case, I mean, he could have had potentially
have had this gun forever. He got the gun already.
(10:07):
The thing that really triggered it was that he wanted
to get a concealed carry permit and he wanted to
expedite that process, so he submitted his fingerprints, and then
once they ran the fingerprints, then it came up that
he had this thing in Mississippi. And in that case,
talk about people who should not own a gun. He
hit his girlfriend with an aluminum baseball bat, he stabbed
her repeatedly with a butcher not and just because he
(10:29):
didn't submit fingerprints the first time around, he was able
to get that gun. They send him a letter, excuse me, sir,
please you shouldn't have this gun? Can you return it?
I mean, that's something that goes into the trash instantly, absolutely,
and what authorities there. They're looking into all this right now.
They're trying to figure out why the first background check
didn't catch that old felony it seems like it should have.
And then they're also investigating why no one did anything
(10:51):
when he didn't turn in the gun. Now, under Illinois law,
local cops don't have to go get the gun from
the guy, but they can, and they didn't in this
case obviously. So that's the case in Illinois. They do
their own background checks, and as you said, the majority
of the country relies on the FBI, and then the
FBI relies on the A. T. F to go and
(11:11):
get these guns back a lot of times. So let's
talk about this other part of the story, banned buyers
and just the rules with buying guns. A lot of times,
in minutes, you can get past your background check if
you have nothing wrong with you, but sometimes things take
a little longer. But because of the federal law, a
sale can proceed after three business days. So let's say
(11:31):
something is weird in somebody's background check and they have
to go back and figure out what's wrong. And this
could take a week, maybe a who knows how long
it could take. But legally the sale can proceed after
three days. That just sounds crazy to me. They passed
the Brady Bill, which was a little big gun control
bill named after model Reagan staffer Mr. Brady, who was
shot during the assassination attempt. Part of it was instituting
(11:54):
this background check system that we now have. Can In
that bill it said that if the background checks are
not finished within three days, the sale can proceed souse
That means like say I go into a gun store.
I want to buy myself a gun, and they see
something in my background that they need to look into further,
so they say put up put a hold on it
for three days. But then say the FBI employee who's
(12:15):
looking into my background say they can't find the record.
There's a lot of records that aren't entered into the
system like they should be, or say they're busy with
other cases and they don't get to it. If three
days passes, I can go back to that gun store
and say, hey, the three days passes, can you sell
me that gun? And the gun store can sell me
the gun even if my background check is not completed.
And the number of these cases where people are getting
guns without a completed background check has been going up
(12:37):
in recent years. In three D, ten thousand sales were
allowed to proceed before the background check was completed, and
we've seen it going up as background checks have gone
up in general, and also as FBI plays have been
overwhelmed trying to do more work and trying to prevent
the next mass shooting. Then what happens so that the
FBI employees they have a lot more scrutiny on on
(12:59):
them these days because of mass shootings in the past,
where mass shooters have gotten guns where they shouldn't have
gotten guns, and so they're working a little harder now.
And what's part of the reason that we're seeing more
of these referrals to the A t F. So the
FBI employee keeps working on the background check and then
they finally find something they're like, oh, man, we shouldn't
have let that guy get that gun. He has his
(13:19):
criminal record from a long time ago, and so they
send the A t F agents out to seize the gun.
And that's what our story was about. They're going out
thousands of times a year to take back guns that
should have never been sold in the first place, and
the number is going up and up. In the latest
year where we have numbers, they're about six thousand times
the A t F agents were sent out to take
bad guns from people who should have never been allowed
(13:42):
to have them. This is a top priority for a
t F agents when it's time to go do this
from the report, if they're working on a drug seizures
or something that's happening at the border or whatnot, and
one of these things come to their attention, it's like
drop everything now and go get this gun back, because
nobody wants to sit on the next mass shooter. And
this happened with Dylan Rufe who shot up the church
(14:03):
and in Charlton, South Carolina. He should not have had
the gun. You're so right after the Dylan Roof case
haunts everyone because what happened with Rufe. If you'll remember,
he's a white supremacist who in he goes to buy
himself a glock and then he shoots up this church.
Was terrible, tragic, horrific shooting, and he shouldn't have been
able to buy the gun. The FBI admitted afterward. What happened.
(14:25):
He had a past drug arrest. When he went to
buy the gun his name, there was a little entry
there in the database, and the FBI employee said, oh,
I should look into that. It looks like he was
arrested for drugs and drug users aren't allowed to own guns,
So I need to get the report from the arrest
so I can make a determination. So this examiner, she
contacted local police, but ended up contacting the wrong local
(14:48):
police department. Anyway, the three days passed and she had
never she didn't get the record, and he got the
gun and they had stopped looking into it, and then
he carried out this horrific attack two months later. So
a judge looked at this case. He blasted the federal
federal government number one, because this report about Roof was
actually in a database that other law enforcement officers can
easily access, but the FBI employees who do the background
(15:12):
checks weren't allowed to access it at the time. So
that has now been changed. Now the FBI employees would
have been able to find the record that it would
have prohibited Roof from getting the gun, but at the
time they did not have access to that database, and
it's a small change, but a pretty significant change. So
they used the National Instant Criminal Background Check System it's
known as n i c S to weed out the
(15:34):
people who pose a public risk and shouldn't be having
these guns. Talk to us about the process of getting
the guns back. It all starts with a letter from
the A. T. S. We'll take you through one of
the cases we talked about in our story. I don't
know how old your listeners are, but there used to
be a famous pro wrestler named Terry Funk, and I
think his catchphrase was something like suck eggs or something
(15:54):
like that. Anyhow, he lives near Amarillo, Texas. He has
a ranch there, and about a decade ago, a guy
named Michael Allan Chance Green, who was a cowboy working
on a ranch nearby, became obsessed with Terry Funk and
he would deliver him these really bizarre handwritten letters in
his mailbox. And Funk told us that he came onto
his property uninvited, and so eventually they charged this Green
(16:17):
guy with um stalking and he goes into the court system,
and well, the judge in the case decides that actually
Green is mentally ill, and so he declares him mentally
incompetent and sends him to a state mental hospital. Come
ten years later, Green goes into a Texas gun shop
and buys himself a rifle and because of the three
day limit on the background checks, it sort of slips
(16:38):
past such pree day limit. He gets his gun, but
then the FBI realizes, oh, this guy was declared mentally incompetent.
He's not allowed to own a gun. So they send
the A t s out to go collect his gun.
And what do they find in his house? They find
that gun and two other revolvers, as well as a
bunch of certified mail receipts what he had sent a
bunch of letters to various politicians. They the FEDS are
(17:00):
insinuating that he may have been a danger. His lawyer,
Green's lawyer said, he's not a danger. He you know,
he just has some mental troubles and he sees the
world definitely not a danger in any event, like sees
his guns. And now he's been a prison medical facility
getting medicated with antipsychotic drugs. But that's an example of
the type of case where they have accidentally let this
guy get a gun and now they have to go
seize it from him. There's been lawsuits related to some
(17:23):
of this stuff. It is going back to Dylan Roof.
Families of the people killed by him tried to sue
the government for failing to stop him from buying a gun.
The US has immunity and such claims like this, so
that case was denied. But even some of the people
in the FBI say, you know that the background check
system is disturbingly superficial, and the single most influential factor
(17:45):
that could be changed without affecting the whole process could
be don't have a three day limit, or wait until
the background check is complete. There's been laws introduced to
that effect, but those things have never really made it
anywhere close to passing. Right, So we talked to Steven Morris,
who used to run the background check system at the FBI.
He's recently retired, and he thought, how do we get
(18:06):
ourselves out of this problem. He thinks it's by extending
that three days. As you say, there are some states
like California that allow more time for background checks, and
there's other states that do that too, And he thinks
that if you could extend it out to five or
ten days, you wouldn't have these so called delay denials
where people are getting the guns that shouldn't get them.
On the other hand, and we do have to we shouldn't,
(18:26):
you know, make it clear. That's that's his view, and
some some other former government officials views to talk to
the n r A. They say, well, why should gun
owners suffer because the government is bad at doing their
background checks? You know, you know, if you want to
fix the problem, make the background check system work better,
get all the records in there, hire more FBI examiners
and so forth, don't take it out on gun owners.
(18:47):
They're worried that people are going to be arbitrarily denied.
You know, they're right to have a gun if the
government's you know, waiting months and months to improve a
background check. And there could be a little bit of
truth to that, you know. It was we said in
was eight point six million gun transactions that were processed
by the FBI. That is an extremely large amount of
gun processing right there. So it is tough to keep
(19:09):
up and and those workers are overworked and over burdened
on this. Thank you very much. You guys at the
Wall Street Journal made an excellent video summing this whole
thing up. I suggest everybody go and check that out.
Zusha Allenson, reporter for The Wall Street Journal. Thank you
very much for joining us. Oh thanks so much for
having me Askar, I really appreciate it. That's it for today.
(19:35):
Join us on social media at Daily Dive Pod on
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Ramirez and this was your Daily Dive
It's Wednesday, February. I'm Oscar Ramirez in Los Angeles, and
this is the Daily Dive. We were waiting for it,
and now it happened. California, along with fifteen other states,
have filed a lawsuit against President Trump's emergency declaration over
border wall funds. The lawsuit argues that the president used
(00:23):
the pretext of a manufactured crisis to declare a national emergency.
The lawsuit will make its way through the Ninth Circuit,
which has ruled against him on various other legal challenges.
Jeremy White, reporter for Politico, joins us to set up
this legal fight next. After last week's shooting in Aurora, Illinois,
one of the first questions that pops up is did
(00:44):
the suspect own the gun legally? In that case, he
passed the background check and got his gun, But he
never should have passed that background check. He had a
prior felony conviction in another state. This is a problem
that arises in cases all across the country, people getting
guns when they shouldn't. There's a on the books that
says a gun sale can proceed after three days even
if the background check isn't completed. Zusha Ellenson, reporter for
(01:07):
the Wall Street Journal, joins us to talk about how
many band buyers get guns and what the a t
F has to do to get them back. It's news
without the noise. Let's dive in and we will have
a national emergency and we will then be sued, and
they will sue us in the Ninth Circuit even though
it shouldn't be there, and we will possibly get a
(01:29):
bad ruling, and then we'll get another bad ruling, and
then we'll end up in the Supreme Court, and hopefully
we'll get a fair shake and we'll win in the
Supreme Court. Joining us now is Jeremy White, California politics
reporter for Politico. So we were waiting for this the
legal objections to President Trump's National Emergency at the border.
California is leading sixteen states in a lawsuit against this
(01:52):
emergency declaration. The Attorney General Javier Basrah announced it on Monday.
What do we know about this complaint? This is now
the third set of lawsuits, and we'll get to that
in a minute. But what is this specific complaints? Say? Well,
the central argument in this complaint, which California filed along
with fifteen other states, is essentially that these states would
suffer real harm from this emergency declaration, both from the
(02:16):
loss of a lot of federal funds that would be
diverted to build the wall, and then in the case
of California, New Mexico, the two border states in the lawsuit,
there's an additional argument that the wall construction would inflict
pretty wide ranging environment damage. All of these states have
democratic attorneys general, but one of these states does. All
(02:36):
of but one of these states have a democratic governors
as well. I think Maryland is the only one that doesn't.
I did have a question because I know, I guess
the states along the border would be mostly impacted. Everybody
else is just kind of signing onto this saying that
we agree with them, even though they have no specific
skin in the game there. Well, as I said, I
think all of these states stand to lose of money.
(02:57):
There's millions of dollars of state here, so you could
certainly make the argument that some states might have more
to loose than others. Again, the border states might actually
have a physical barrier within their territory could arguably see
a larger impact. But you know the argument of that
all of these states are going to see some form
of loss of funds at least, and I guess it
depends where they choose to take the money away from
(03:19):
to actually allocate there to the border a little more
into the complain, all of these states are basically saying, yeah,
there could be some irreparable environmental damage. But a lot
of this plays out kind of like a lot of
the talking points that we've seen going around in the
discussion leading up to this, basically things that the President
is manufacturing a crisis. The border crossings are down, it's
(03:40):
mostly asylum seekers that are getting to ports of entries,
So a lot of this is kind of take down
in a political sense, and that's a lot of how
they're structuring it. They're even using his own words against
him when he said he didn't need to do this, certainly,
and I think everybody who was watching that press conference,
particularly the people like California Attorney General Javier B. Sara,
(04:02):
sat up and took notice when the President said that,
and sort of I think a lot of them saw
that as laying out their legal case for them. Javier B.
Sarah said in a press conference that day repeatedly that
the President had already said he didn't have to do it,
and indeed the lawsuit cited those words, and also, as
it's becoming kind of a computer de trump Era cites
(04:22):
a lot of tweets from the President in addition to
public statements about how he was turned to build the
lall for years and years, sort of laying out the
case that he was going to attempt to do this
regardless of whether there was merit to his claim of
an emergency existing. And as you said, I think the
arguments in this lawsuit by and large track some of
(04:44):
the political debate we've seen. This lawsuit also builds on
California's record of defying the administration. They've have also a
number of fights with the administration. This is also going
to be set up in the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals,
which the President specifically is called out a number of
times saying, you know, even in that press conference that
we were talking about, he said, Hey, this is gonna
(05:05):
get filed there. We're gonna lose, We're gonna go back
and forth, and eventually it's gonna go back to the
Supreme Court and talk to us a little bit about
the troubles that the president has had with the Ninth
Circuit nothing knew that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals
is seen as a more liberal court that tends to
side with more liberal arguments for plaintiffs. And as you
point out, California has filed coming on fifty lawsuits against
(05:27):
the Trump administration. So there's certainly been plenty of action
in the Ninth Circuit. And I think it obviously remains
to be seen where the courts end up on this one,
but the President certainly made sure in his response to
mention the Ninth Circuit right away. Looking at the larger context,
the President literally is thinking about the political implications of
(05:50):
this emergency declaration and of sort of showing his supporters
that he is willing to take the site of action
to build this wall. I think in the same way,
he's sort of signaling to his supporters it's us against
the system that's stacked against us by liberals. Right. Yeah,
he called the Democrats the radical left. Obviously, he did
mention the Ninth Circuit, and he also called California for
(06:12):
their high speed rail train project that got half canceled.
I guess he said that, you know, they're out of
control with their fast train and there's no hope of completion.
They seem to be in charge of this whole mess also,
so just kind of continuing to hit on them when
we're looking at timeline. Now, how long is this part
of the process going to take. I can't say that
for sure, but I think it's fair to say that
(06:34):
we are going to see a lengthy legal process that
is likely going to be an appealed to the Supreme Court.
We've seen that, we had several of the issues in
which California has challenged the Trump administration bannd on visitors
from majority Muslim countries. There's a lawsuit about asking about
immigration of the U. S. Census. Supreme Court is going
(06:55):
to take a look at. So I think this fits
into a larger pattern of Trump attempting to carry out
his agenda in California, being among the leaders that says,
let's put this to the constitutional test, yep, and now
it's time to wait, let's see what the judges say,
and then, as the President did already allude to, that's
the next level appeal and go back and forth for
(07:16):
a little while. Jeremy White, California politics reporter for Politico,
Thank you very much for joining us. Thanks so much
for having me guys, A t F agents had to
track down guns sold to more than six thousand people
(07:37):
who are identified after the fact as being legally banned
from buying them. The National Instant Criminal Background System, or
n i c S, is supposed to prevent that. The
FBI's background check system denied more than a hundred thousand
gun transactions in but according to federal data and interviews
with law enforcement officials, their holes in the system and
(08:00):
a crush of background requests and that's undermining the government's
ability to keep guns out of the hands of the
wrong people. Joining us now is Zusha Ellenson, reporter for
The Wall Street Journal covering guns, cops, and crime. You
guys had a very interesting story about how the a
t F retrieves guns from band buyers. These are people
(08:20):
who have bought guns and then later on it turns
out that they should not have had these guns, and
the process that they go through to get those things back.
Last week, we just had a workplace shooting in Illinois
where the gunman killed five people. He had a gun legally,
but we found out later This is the first question
(08:40):
that everybody always asks, is he's supposed to have this gun?
We found out he wasn't supposed to actually have this,
but he went through the process. They did give him
the gun, and then it was something that he didn't
disclose that allowed him to get this. Let's talk about
that first and then we'll get into the a t
F So an excellent point. After every one of these
mats shootings, right, the first thing people want to know,
should this guy have been able to own a gun?
(09:02):
As everyone knows, there's laws about who can own a
gun in this country. If you have a past felony,
if you've been committed to say, a mental asylum, as
you've had other legal troubles, you're not allowed to own
a gun. And it turns out this guy, Gary Martin,
who shot up his former workplace outside of Chicago. There
he had a past felony, a conviction for felony assault
back in which should have prohibited from him from ever
(09:24):
buying a gun, But somehow he slipped through the state
background check system there in Illinois and was able to
purchase a gun. Now, Illinois is one of thirteen states
that does their own background checks. The rest of the
country mainly relies on the FBI, so the state does
their own background checks. They did an initial check on
him that missed his old felony. He gets his little
(09:45):
firearms card, he buys the gun, They light her, find
out he has this old felony. By then it's too late.
They asked him to turn it in. He doesn't turn
it in and they don't go to see it. So
he keeps the same Smith and Western handgun that he
used in the horrific attack of last week, just because
the background check system didn't catch him in Illinois, and
in this case, I mean, he could have had potentially
have had this gun forever. He got the gun already.
(10:07):
The thing that really triggered it was that he wanted
to get a concealed carry permit and he wanted to
expedite that process, so he submitted his fingerprints, and then
once they ran the fingerprints, then it came up that
he had this thing in Mississippi. And in that case,
talk about people who should not own a gun. He
hit his girlfriend with an aluminum baseball bat, he stabbed
her repeatedly with a butcher not and just because he
(10:29):
didn't submit fingerprints the first time around, he was able
to get that gun. They send him a letter, excuse me, sir,
please you shouldn't have this gun? Can you return it?
I mean, that's something that goes into the trash instantly, absolutely,
and what authorities there. They're looking into all this right now.
They're trying to figure out why the first background check
didn't catch that old felony it seems like it should have.
And then they're also investigating why no one did anything
(10:51):
when he didn't turn in the gun. Now, under Illinois law,
local cops don't have to go get the gun from
the guy, but they can, and they didn't in this
case obviously. So that's the case in Illinois. They do
their own background checks, and as you said, the majority
of the country relies on the FBI, and then the
FBI relies on the A. T. F to go and
(11:11):
get these guns back a lot of times. So let's
talk about this other part of the story, banned buyers
and just the rules with buying guns. A lot of times,
in minutes, you can get past your background check if
you have nothing wrong with you, but sometimes things take
a little longer. But because of the federal law, a
sale can proceed after three business days. So let's say
(11:31):
something is weird in somebody's background check and they have
to go back and figure out what's wrong. And this
could take a week, maybe a who knows how long
it could take. But legally the sale can proceed after
three days. That just sounds crazy to me. They passed
the Brady Bill, which was a little big gun control
bill named after model Reagan staffer Mr. Brady, who was
shot during the assassination attempt. Part of it was instituting
(11:54):
this background check system that we now have. Can In
that bill it said that if the background checks are
not finished within three days, the sale can proceed souse
That means like say I go into a gun store.
I want to buy myself a gun, and they see
something in my background that they need to look into further,
so they say put up put a hold on it
for three days. But then say the FBI employee who's
(12:15):
looking into my background say they can't find the record.
There's a lot of records that aren't entered into the
system like they should be, or say they're busy with
other cases and they don't get to it. If three
days passes, I can go back to that gun store
and say, hey, the three days passes, can you sell
me that gun? And the gun store can sell me
the gun even if my background check is not completed.
And the number of these cases where people are getting
guns without a completed background check has been going up
(12:37):
in recent years. In three D, ten thousand sales were
allowed to proceed before the background check was completed, and
we've seen it going up as background checks have gone
up in general, and also as FBI plays have been
overwhelmed trying to do more work and trying to prevent
the next mass shooting. Then what happens so that the
FBI employees they have a lot more scrutiny on on
(12:59):
them these days because of mass shootings in the past,
where mass shooters have gotten guns where they shouldn't have
gotten guns, and so they're working a little harder now.
And what's part of the reason that we're seeing more
of these referrals to the A t F. So the
FBI employee keeps working on the background check and then
they finally find something they're like, oh, man, we shouldn't
have let that guy get that gun. He has his
(13:19):
criminal record from a long time ago, and so they
send the A t F agents out to seize the gun.
And that's what our story was about. They're going out
thousands of times a year to take back guns that
should have never been sold in the first place, and
the number is going up and up. In the latest
year where we have numbers, they're about six thousand times
the A t F agents were sent out to take
bad guns from people who should have never been allowed
(13:42):
to have them. This is a top priority for a
t F agents when it's time to go do this
from the report, if they're working on a drug seizures
or something that's happening at the border or whatnot, and
one of these things come to their attention, it's like
drop everything now and go get this gun back, because
nobody wants to sit on the next mass shooter. And
this happened with Dylan Rufe who shot up the church
(14:03):
and in Charlton, South Carolina. He should not have had
the gun. You're so right after the Dylan Roof case
haunts everyone because what happened with Rufe. If you'll remember,
he's a white supremacist who in he goes to buy
himself a glock and then he shoots up this church.
Was terrible, tragic, horrific shooting, and he shouldn't have been
able to buy the gun. The FBI admitted afterward. What happened.
(14:25):
He had a past drug arrest. When he went to
buy the gun his name, there was a little entry
there in the database, and the FBI employee said, oh,
I should look into that. It looks like he was
arrested for drugs and drug users aren't allowed to own guns,
So I need to get the report from the arrest
so I can make a determination. So this examiner, she
contacted local police, but ended up contacting the wrong local
(14:48):
police department. Anyway, the three days passed and she had
never she didn't get the record, and he got the
gun and they had stopped looking into it, and then
he carried out this horrific attack two months later. So
a judge looked at this case. He blasted the federal
federal government number one, because this report about Roof was
actually in a database that other law enforcement officers can
easily access, but the FBI employees who do the background
(15:12):
checks weren't allowed to access it at the time. So
that has now been changed. Now the FBI employees would
have been able to find the record that it would
have prohibited Roof from getting the gun, but at the
time they did not have access to that database, and
it's a small change, but a pretty significant change. So
they used the National Instant Criminal Background Check System it's
known as n i c S to weed out the
(15:34):
people who pose a public risk and shouldn't be having
these guns. Talk to us about the process of getting
the guns back. It all starts with a letter from
the A. T. S. We'll take you through one of
the cases we talked about in our story. I don't
know how old your listeners are, but there used to
be a famous pro wrestler named Terry Funk, and I
think his catchphrase was something like suck eggs or something
(15:54):
like that. Anyhow, he lives near Amarillo, Texas. He has
a ranch there, and about a decade ago, a guy
named Michael Allan Chance Green, who was a cowboy working
on a ranch nearby, became obsessed with Terry Funk and
he would deliver him these really bizarre handwritten letters in
his mailbox. And Funk told us that he came onto
his property uninvited, and so eventually they charged this Green
(16:17):
guy with um stalking and he goes into the court system,
and well, the judge in the case decides that actually
Green is mentally ill, and so he declares him mentally
incompetent and sends him to a state mental hospital. Come
ten years later, Green goes into a Texas gun shop
and buys himself a rifle and because of the three
day limit on the background checks, it sort of slips
(16:38):
past such pree day limit. He gets his gun, but
then the FBI realizes, oh, this guy was declared mentally incompetent.
He's not allowed to own a gun. So they send
the A t s out to go collect his gun.
And what do they find in his house? They find
that gun and two other revolvers, as well as a
bunch of certified mail receipts what he had sent a
bunch of letters to various politicians. They the FEDS are
(17:00):
insinuating that he may have been a danger. His lawyer,
Green's lawyer said, he's not a danger. He you know,
he just has some mental troubles and he sees the
world definitely not a danger in any event, like sees
his guns. And now he's been a prison medical facility
getting medicated with antipsychotic drugs. But that's an example of
the type of case where they have accidentally let this
guy get a gun and now they have to go
seize it from him. There's been lawsuits related to some
(17:23):
of this stuff. It is going back to Dylan Roof.
Families of the people killed by him tried to sue
the government for failing to stop him from buying a gun.
The US has immunity and such claims like this, so
that case was denied. But even some of the people
in the FBI say, you know that the background check
system is disturbingly superficial, and the single most influential factor
(17:45):
that could be changed without affecting the whole process could
be don't have a three day limit, or wait until
the background check is complete. There's been laws introduced to
that effect, but those things have never really made it
anywhere close to passing. Right, So we talked to Steven Morris,
who used to run the background check system at the FBI.
He's recently retired, and he thought, how do we get
(18:06):
ourselves out of this problem. He thinks it's by extending
that three days. As you say, there are some states
like California that allow more time for background checks, and
there's other states that do that too, And he thinks
that if you could extend it out to five or
ten days, you wouldn't have these so called delay denials
where people are getting the guns that shouldn't get them.
On the other hand, and we do have to we shouldn't,
(18:26):
you know, make it clear. That's that's his view, and
some some other former government officials views to talk to
the n r A. They say, well, why should gun
owners suffer because the government is bad at doing their
background checks? You know, you know, if you want to
fix the problem, make the background check system work better,
get all the records in there, hire more FBI examiners
and so forth, don't take it out on gun owners.
(18:47):
They're worried that people are going to be arbitrarily denied.
You know, they're right to have a gun if the
government's you know, waiting months and months to improve a
background check. And there could be a little bit of
truth to that, you know. It was we said in
was eight point six million gun transactions that were processed
by the FBI. That is an extremely large amount of
gun processing right there. So it is tough to keep
(19:09):
up and and those workers are overworked and over burdened
on this. Thank you very much. You guys at the
Wall Street Journal made an excellent video summing this whole
thing up. I suggest everybody go and check that out.
Zusha Allenson, reporter for The Wall Street Journal. Thank you
very much for joining us. Oh thanks so much for
having me Askar, I really appreciate it. That's it for today.
(19:35):
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