PD Editorial: A tiny step forward on gun safety

News item: A bipartisan group of seven U.S. senators is co-sponsoring legislation to improve background checks on prospective gun buyers.

If it becomes law, and that’s by no means assured, the Senate legislation wouldn’t stop law-abiding citizens from purchasing firearms, including the military-style knockoffs used in so many mass shootings.

But it might impede felons and others who are prohibited from possessing firearms.

That would be, as Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal said, a “modest breakthrough.”

The “breakthrough,” requiring state and federal agencies to do a better job of reporting relevant information to the FBI for use in background checks, comes too late for the 26 people killed earlier this month at First Baptist Church in Sutherland Springs, Texas.

The perpetrator, Devin P. Kelley, had been convicted in a military court and served a prison sentence for domestic violence, which should have prevented him from buying a firearm. But the U.S. Air Force didn’t report that information to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System.

Reporting failures by state and federal agencies are a chronic problem, detailed in reports by the Government Accountability Office and the Justice Department’s inspector general.

The system, created in 1998, requires sales to be authorized by default if a background check cannot be completed within three days. Incomplete records result in hundreds of thousands of default sales annually, according to federal data.

Even more sales are completed without any background check because they take place at gun shows or between private parties. (California requires background checks on all in-state gun sales.)

Kelley isn’t the first (or even the second) mass-shooter missed by the background check system.

Closing the loopholes wouldn’t be difficult and shouldn’t be controversial. There is widespread public support, even among gun owners. A poll released last week by Quinnipiac University found that 94 percent of voters favor universal background checks.

But Congress, frightened more by Second Amendment absolutists than it’s moved by human suffering caused by gun violence, has done nothing.

That’s not quite true. Earlier this year, Congress passed, and President Donald Trump signed, legislation prohibiting the Social Security Administration from forwarding information about recipients with mental disabilities to the background check system. So, in fact, Congress made it harder to identify people who aren’t allowed to possess firearms.

The legislation announced last week by Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, and others falls far short of fixing the background check system. But it’s a baby step in the right direction.

We hope it passes, and we hope it proves more effective than the last time Congress offered incentives for state and federal agencies to provide information for the background check system. That came after 32 people were killed at Virginia Tech University in 2007 by a gunman whose past commitment to a mental hospital hadn’t been entered in the database.

A universal background check system wouldn’t stop every act of gun violence. But the Swiss-cheese system now in place contributes to scores of senseless deaths. Is Congress finally ready to take the smallest of steps to reduce the carnage?