Why are taxpayers funding the mismanaged, bumbling, and corrupt FBI?
The FBI never completes hundreds of thousands of gun background checks each year because of a deadline that requires it to purge them from its computers, despite a report that raised alarms about the practice in 2015.
The data obtained by CQ Roll Call, which has not been previously published, shows how the FBI still struggles to complete background checks four years after a breakdown in the system contributed to a shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, that left nine black churchgoers dead.
A 2015 internal report on what went wrong in that case recommended ways to decrease the number of background checks that take longer than 88 days. After that point, the FBI must purge checks from its computers. That year, the bureau processed more than 8.9 million checks and never completed 200,360. That number rose in 2016 and 2017 before a slight dip last year, when the FBI processed 8.2 million checks but did not complete 201,323.
All told, the FBI did not complete over 1.1 million background checks from 2014 through July 2019.
Since the data is purged, it’s impossible to know how many of those people have purchased guns without a completed background check — or how many purchases would have been blocked if the background checks were complete.
“Based on this data, it would be illogical to argue that Americans are more safe today than they were in 2015,” said W. Mullins McLeod Jr., who represents several families of Charleston victims. The families are suing the federal government over what they say was FBI negligence that allowed shooter Dylann Roof to buy a gun despite a previous drug arrest that should have prohibited him.
The internal report on the Roof case found that the bureau focused on background checks it could complete quickly and paid “little attention” to checks that took longer than three business days. Little has changed since then, the newly released data shows. In 2015, almost 74 percent of checks that took longer than three business days were never completed. In 2018, that number was almost 73 percent.
The newly released data also appears to reveal part of a trend that stretches back decades. A 2016 report by the Justice Department’s inspector general found that the FBI did not complete 1.3 million background checks from fiscal 2003 through May 2013 because they hit the 88-day mark. – READ MORE