COLUMBUS, Ohio — Background checks are meant to safeguard against the wrong people legally buying guns.
But what happens when those background checks fail?
“It is very disheartening to know that individual is out there today with a firearm that possibly shouldn't be,” said Eric Delbert, owner of LEPD gun shop. “We are always abiding by the rules. We are always doing it legally, and watching out. Sometimes the system is against you.”
When someone is trying to buy a gun, the gun shop has the FBI do a background check. Most of the time those checks come back immediately.
If it takes longer than three days, the gun shop can legally sell the gun, even if they don't know the outcome of the background check.
“On occasion, and it happened to us recently, approximately 50 days after we ran a background check, I believe it was 58 days, the system came back and said denied. In this case, the firearm had long since gone out the door,” Delbert said.
The FBI confirmed in a statement, saying in part, "An FFL (Federal firearms licensees) may legally transfer a firearm to the prospective transferee after three business days have passed if the FFL has not received a 'deny' notification from the NICS. Applicable state laws may extend this minimum waiting period."
Ohio doesn't have a background check law so gun dealers have to go by federal law and initiate the check directly through the FBI.
According to federal law, if the gun is sold and the background check comes back after three days as denied, the ATF then tries to track down that weapon.
The latest ATF data shows it happened nearly 3,000 times nationally in 2019, more than 4,000 times in 2018, and 6,000 in 2017.
For some perspective, in total, there were more than 28 million national instant crime background checks conducted in 2019.