On Tuesday, Politico reported that the Justice Department is asking Congress to boost funding to enforce federal gun laws, as panic over coronavirus causes gun sales to surge.
"In recent outreach to Capitol Hill, DOJ made two requests related to the spike in gun purchases, according to two sources with knowledge of those asks," reported Betsy Woodruff Swan. "First, the department asked for funding to help the FBI hire more staff to keep up with the growing number of background checks and appeal requests going through the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). The bureau runs that system, which handles background checks on millions of gun buyers every year."
"The department also asked for more resources and personnel for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) to deal with firearm retrievals and other field work related to delayed denials, according to the two sources," continued the report.
Although background checks typically take just minutes, there are cases in which the system delays a response for days — and people are generally allowed to purchase the firearm if an answer hasn't been returned in three days. This is known as the "Charleston loophole," as it is how white supremacist killer Dylann Roof was able to obtain the gun used in the Charleston church massacre. In theory, federal agents are supposed to confiscate guns from people who obtain weapons before a "delayed denial" — but in practice, stretched law enforcement resources make this difficult.
"The request from the Justice Department indicates it’s preparing for a growing number of such retrievals as gun sales go up," said the report. "The FBI ran more than 2.9 million background checks in April 2020, the most April background checks since 1999. And in March, it ran a whopping 3.7 million background checks — the most in any month since November 1998, when the FBI launched the NICS program, according to its website."
