On Thursday, President Joe Biden took a giant step toward making us safer from gun violence by making it harder for someone who shouldn’t possess a gun to buy one. Next week will mark the 25th anniversary of the deadly massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado. The 13 victims murdered that day were killed by two students firing guns lawfully acquired without any background checks.
Since Columbine, many other mass shootings have been linked to guns purchased without the benefit of a background check, and lawmakers and officials have mightily struggled to eliminate this often fatal gap in gun safety, known as the gun show loophole. The new rules should take effect in one month. It’s not a moment too soon.
When the proposed changes were opened up for 90 days of public comments, two-thirds of the 400,000 responses favored the new rule.
The gun show loophole is sometimes called the “private sale exception.” That’s because it allows those who sell guns at private or informal settings, such as gun shows or flea markets, to do so without initiating the law enforcement background checks on their customers that are required of federally licensed gun sellers who often conduct business at brick-and-mortar firearms stores. The new rule, to be enforced by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF), redefines sellers required to conduct background checks as anyone “engaged in the business” of selling guns at a profit.” Those sellers must now register as a federally licensed firearms dealer and submit buyers’ data for criminal records and mental health queries even if they only deal in a small number of transactions.
The U.S. Justice Department noted that the new requirement will apply to more than 23,000 currently unlicensed dealers and cover tens of thousands of gun sales annually. That means thousands of gun sales previously conducted in a kind of double-blind transaction, with law enforcement in the dark as to whether the seller is a…
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