Members of the Bromfield Speech and Debate Team read an inspirational article explaining how students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in the Parkland school district were empowered through their district’s speech and debate program to speak out in favor of gun control. When arguing their case to lawmakers, the Parkland students used their preparation for the November debate topic “Resolved: The United States should require universal background checks for all gun sales and transfers of ownership.” The Parkland students emphasized that having to learn and debate both sides of the resolution helped them when it came to speaking up, even if they weren’t the stars of the team. Bromfield’s team, which debated the same topic, wanted to compile the research they had done and do something similar to advocate for gun control.
What are we advocating for
Right now, the United States has a policy of background checks that applies to public sales only. The background checks go through the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), with most checks taking seconds to complete. Universal background checks (UBCs) would expand the background check system to close the private sales loophole (gun shows, etc.), forcing all who are trying to get a gun to go through that background check system. This is important because the Giffords Law Center, a gun legislation advocacy group, reports that 42 percent of gun owners now obtain their firearms without going through a background check, meaning that “by far, the most dangerous gap in federal firearms laws today is the background check loophole.”
Furthermore, the NICS system is far from perfect. During especially high periods of gun purchases, the system can get bogged down, and gun purchases are approved by default when more than three days pass without a response. According to David Johnson of Time magazine, this has put nearly 60,000 guns into uncleared hands since 1998, including to Dylann Roof of the Charleston shooting in 2015. Many states also do not submit mental health data and criminal records to the system, resulting in huge gaps that can be exploited. Thus, we advocate for the implementation of UBCs and improvement to the NICS system.
Of course, this is only a fraction of the potential solutions to gun violence. However, we don’t believe you can debate without having facts, and we don’t want to advocate for policies that we haven’t researched as thoroughly.
Why
The simple act of a background check can screen out many of those who would be dangerous with a gun, deter others from even applying, and reduce the number of guns in the country because the NICS system prevents sales to criminals who have committed felonies (murder, rape, etc.), domestic abusers, and those found to be dangerously mentally ill by the courts. Currently, nine states and the District of Columbia have these checks in place.
The purpose of background checks is not to inhibit legitimate owners from buying guns, but to prevent people with potential to commit violence against themselves or others from obtaining a gun. When such individuals are blocked, UBCs cause gun death rates to decreases significantly. For example, Connecticut saw a 40 percent reduction in homicide rates in the first 10 years after the policy was implemented. Missouri, in contrast, saw a 16 percent increase in suicides and a 23 percent increase in homicides after UBC laws were repealed there in 2007, according to a study done by Johns Hopkins University.
Thus, on net, U.S. Representative Tim Waltz of Minnesota claimed in an interview with 103.5 KYSM that in states where there are universal background check laws, there are 52 percent fewer mass shootings and 48 percent fewer law enforcement officials shot to death by a handgun. The Lancet, an international medical journal, concluded after conducting a study on states with UBCs that if the United States were to implement UBCs, the national gun death rate would fall by 57 percent, and if combined with background checks for ammunition purchases and firearm identification laws, deaths would fall by over 90 percent in the long term.
However, one thing is important to note. The laws must be supported and enforced by the government in order to work. Lois Beckett of the Guardian reported that although the implementation of UBCs had dramatic effects in reducing gun death rates in some states, the same effect was not seen in Colorado and Washington. Why? The measures were not enforced by state authorities or government due to political hurdles and partisanship. If the federal government is going to be enacting UBCs, it must plan to enforce them nationally.
Addressing counterarguments
Finally, in the true spirit of debate, we wanted to address some potential counterarguments to the implementation of UBCs.
First, constitutionality and the Second Amendment: We would argue that although the Second Amendment gives individuals a right to own firearms, this right does not extend to those who are prevented by the NICS system from obtaining a gun. In its landmark 5–4 District of Columbia v. Heller decision, where the Supreme Court ruled some of D.C.’s gun control legislation unconstitutional, the Court held that the Second Amendment protects the right to own a gun by responsible people but permits measures to keep guns out of the hands of felons and the mentally ill. The majority opinon in Heller acknowledged that the Second Amendment right is not unlimited.
The point of background checks is not to seize guns from people, but to prevent the sales of guns to those who are deemed unfit to own them. All rights come with exceptions, like being unable to shout “fire” in a crowded theater as an exception to free speech. As much as we have a right to guns, we also have a right to life and safety.
Second, self defense: the argument that guns are needed for protection. The problem with this argument is that research published this year in the American Journal of Epidemiology found that Americans who keep guns in the home were 90 percent more likely to die by homicide than Americans who don’t. A paper in the American Journal of Public Health, meanwhile, determined that a person with a gun was 4.5 times more likely to be shot in an assault than someone who was unarmed. Owning a gun actually increases your risk of death in two ways. First, guns allow situations to escalate faster than other weapons, such as knives, increasing the chance of lethal violence. Second, John Donohue of CNN, citing a study conducted by Arthur Kellerman of the RAND Institute of Health, quantifies that an intruder is twice as likely to obtain a victim’s gun and use it against the victim than the victim is to use the firearm in self-defense.
Third, an increase in straw purchases, or instances where someone legally purchases a gun and then gives it to someone who would not have passed a background check: After a crime, straw purchases are harder to track than regular purchases because the transfers are not logged. Luckily, UBCs make it easier to target straw sales. Greg Sargent of the Washington Post explains how background checks disincentivize straw purchases. Police investigating a case can trace the gun to the straw purchaser, at which point that person can be prosecuted for illegally transferring a firearm. This is why the Gifford Law Center finds that straw purchases are significantly more common in states with little to no regulation regarding the transfer of firearms than they are in states with UBCs.
Black market
Fourth, an increase in the size of the black market, which, like straw sales, is unregulated: UBCs actually decrease the size of the black market in two ways. The first is through cost alone. Due to supply and demand, Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a government-funded program, finds that guns on the black market are substantially more expensive, with criminals paying $250 to $400 on the black market for guns that are valued at $50 to $100 in the legal market. Second is risk. Mayors Against Illegal Guns continues that black market transactions pose a substantial risk of harm or arrest, as more than one in three attempts to buy a gun from a black market dealer end in failure. The black market deters less determined criminals from attempting to purchase a gun. And even if the black market does increase marginally under a system of UBCs, the number of lives saved will most likely be greater than the slight increase in illegal guns. This is shown in states like Connecticut and Missouri, where gun death rates decreased with UBCs. And in Connecticut specifically, criminals did not switch to using some other weapon to commit murder when they failed to get their hands on a firearm.
Conclusion
Improving the NICS background checks system and implementing universal background checks nationally as a prerequisite to buying a gun would decrease gun death rates.
