The Brady Law went into effect 14 years ago today, February 28, 1994.

On anniversaries like this, it is important to remember what the Brady Law has accomplished, how effective the law has been at helping reduce gun crime, and how bitterly the NRA fought to kill it - including their effort to have the Brady Law struck down as unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Since 1994, the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act (the “Brady Law”) has stopped an estimated 1.4 million criminals and other “prohibited purchasers” from buying guns from Federally licensed gun dealers. As the Bureau of Justice Statistics has shown, the rate of gun crime in America then plummeted for years. “After peaking in 1993,” the BJS reports, “the number of gun crimes reported to police declined and then stabilized at levels last seen in 1988.” Furthermore, according to the BJS, “nonfatal firearm-related crime has plummeted since 1993, before increasing in 2005.

“Before the Brady Law was enacted, most states didn’t require background checks of gun purchasers at all. While the Gun Control Act of 1968 made it illegal for felons, fugitives, the dangerously mentally ill and other “prohibited purchasers” to buy firearms, there was no national mechanism to help enforce this rule.

This meant that until February 28, 1994, gun dealers and gun buyers worked on the “honor” system. As long as gun buyers promised they weren’t dangerous on a Federal form, prohibited purchasers could get away with buying, and gun dealers could get away with selling, as many guns as they wanted. And if their guns were later used in crime, a gun dealer could always say, “The buyer lied to me. How could I know?” Before 1994, criminal gun buyers and dealers could ignore the Gun Control Act with impunity.

After 1994, however, we entered the era of “Trust, but verify.”

President Ronald Reagan often used that phrase in the context of international arms control in dealing with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and others.

When it comes to “domestic arms control,” the Brady Law does the same thing. It recognizes that most gun buyers and gun dealers are honest, but it works to filter out those purchasers who are dishonest - about 1.4 million people so far - by checking to make sure.

It only makes sense that President Reagan would come out in favor of passing the Brady Bill. In an eloquent Op-Ed in the New York Times on March 29, 1991, one day before the 10th anniversary of the assassination attempt on his life and that of his Press Secretary, James S. Brady, President Reagan described his own incredible ordeal of surviving the shooting, and then went on to talk about Jim:

 

“I was lucky. The bullet that hit me bounced off a rib and lodged in my lung, an inch from my heart. It was a very close call. Twice they could not find my pulse. But the bullet’s missing my heart, the skill of the doctors and nurses at George Washington University Hospital and the steadfast support of my wife, Nancy, saved my life. “Jim Brady, my press secretary, who was standing next to me, wasn’t as lucky. A bullet entered the left side of his forehead, near his eye, and passed through the right side of his brain before it exited. The skills of the George Washington University medical team, plus his amazing determination and the grit and spirit of his wife, Sarah, pulled Jim through. His recovery has been remarkable, but he still lives with physical pain every day and must spend much of his time in a wheelchair. “Thomas Delahanty, a Washington police officer, took a bullet in his neck. It ricocheted off his spinal cord. Nerve damage to his left arm forced his retirement in November 1981. “Tim McCarthy, a Secret Service agent, was shot in the chest and suffered a lacerated liver. He recovered and returned to duty.”

Then, President Reagan made his position crystal clear:

“Still, four lives were changed forever, and all by a Saturday-night special — a cheaply made .22 caliber pistol — purchased in a Dallas pawnshop by a young man with a history of mental disturbance.  

“This nightmare might never have happened if legislation that is before Congress now — the Brady bill — had been law back in 1981.”

Those moving thoughts are worth remembering still.

A gaping loophole in the Brady Law remains, however, and Congress needs to take action immediately to help close it. Currently, only Federally licensed gun dealers are required to run Brady background checks on gun purchasers. That means there are millions of gun sales by unlicensed sellers not subject to Brady checks at all. In fact, one study done for the National Institute of Justice reports that about 40% of all firearms sold in America are sold by unlicensed sellers with no Brady background check required. A significant proportion of these unlicensed sales occur at gun shows, allowing criminals and other prohibited purchasers to arm themselves with no questions asked.

That’s wrong, and Congress needs to do something about it. Sen. Frank Lautenberg (NJ) and Sen. Jack Reed (RI) recently introduced a bill to close the gun show loophole and require checks on all gun purchases at gun shows. I urge the Congress to pass this bill as soon as possible.

Make no mistake, it’s been a long and difficult fight, but America is turning the corner on the gun issue. The country should not let the gun lobby stand in the way of public safety.

Common-sense gun control like the Brady Law saves lives, and the American people know it.

(Note to readers: This entry, along with past entries, has been co-posted on bradycampaign.org/blog and the Huffington Post.)

I wanted to take a moment to let you know about a new addition to the Brady Campaign Web site: the Brady Research Update. The Update will be a regular web feature providing updates on recently published research articles, fact sheets, and other resources.

This new feature now makes www.bradycampaign.org/issues even more of a valuable site for research and statistics, as well as a resource center for advocates, the media, and the general public. (You can also find it at www.millionmommarch.org/learn.)

Both sites are updated regularly, so check back often.

(Note to readers: This entry, along with past entries, has been co-posted on bradycampaign.org/blog and the Huffington Post.)

Our thoughts and prayers are with the victims and families touched by the recent gun violence at Northern Illinois University. At a time when the country confronts one mass shooting after another – six separate multiple murders across the country in just the first two weeks of February – the nation is faced with a critical choice:

Do we give up and say we can’t do anything about these tragedies? Or do we take common-sense steps today to make it harder for dangerous people to get dangerous weapons?

Every day in America, 32 people are murdered with guns. That’s a daily Virginia Tech. This tragic figure is not due to natural or mysterious forces beyond our control. People cause this problem and people can fix it.

Over the years, the Brady Campaign has proposed numerous common-sense measures to reduce and prevent gun violence. It may be difficult to stop “suicide shooters” like the Northern Illinois University killer, but there are steps we can take as a nation.

We can require background checks for every gun transaction in America. Current Federal law requires that only Federally licensed gun dealers do a computer check on the criminal backgrounds of purchasers who buy guns from them. Yet there is no such restriction on unlicensed sellers who sell guns at gun shows, from the trunk of their cars or at their kitchen tables. If we want to make it harder to dangerous people to get dangerous weapons, we must close this loophole, and require that all gun buyers undergo a background check.

We can limit bulk purchases of handguns to cut down on the illegal gun trade [pdf]. Gun buyers currently have no Federal limits on the number of guns they can buy at one time. Gun traffickers take advantage of the unlimited number of guns they can purchase at a time in order to sell guns to criminals and gangs. Combine this weakness in the law with the use of “straw purchasers� or with unlicensed sellers, and a gun trafficker can buy dozens of cheap handguns at a time and re-sell them on the street at a hefty markup. Who personally needs more than 12 or even 24 handguns per year? We should limit bulk purchases of handguns to cut down on gun trafficking and the supply of weapons to the illegal market.

We can also ban the sale of military-style assault weapons and high capacity ammunition magazines. One thing the Virginia Tech and Northern Illinois University shooters had in common was that they both used high capacity ammunition magazines that would have been prohibited under the Federal Assault Weapons Ban that expired in 2004. Furthermore, there is no reason that weapons of war should be made easily available to citizens who are not police officers or in the military. We should support our local law enforcement officers as they put their lives on the line to protect ours, and reduce the chances that they will be out-gunned on our streets by these high-powered firearms.

The Northern Illinois University shooting happened on the anniversary of Chicago’s “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre,â€� February 14, 1929, and a day before the anniversary of the attempted assassination of President-elect Franklin D. Roosevelt, and the killing of Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak on February 15, 1933. Those events led to one of the few national gun control laws still on the books, the National Firearms Act of 1934. Our recent gun violence should also lead us to take action.

As we grieve with the victims and families of this latest mass shooting, I call on college and university presidents across America to join with us in demanding that candidates for President, the U.S. Congress, and State Legislatures across the country support meaningful action to prevent gun violence, such as the measures listed above.

Our gun laws today are tragically weak. Much more could be done to help make our schools and communities safer.

(Note to readers: This entry, along with past entries, has been co-posted on bradycampaign.org/blog and the Huffington Post.)

On Thursday, an individual who had “serious grievances with the city government� in the St. Louis suburb of Kirkwood, Missouri brought his gun to the police station and then a City Council meeting and killed five people – first two police officers, then two council members and the public works director – and wounded two others, including the mayor.

According to the killer’s brother, the shooter “went to war tonight with the people, the government that was putting torment and strife into his life.” News reports mentioned that the shooter “felt harassedâ€� because police “cracked down on his parking of vehicles for his construction company outside his home….â€�

After two arrests for disorderly conduct at council meetings in 2006, and a subsequent conviction, the shooter continued to regularly attend and disrupt council meetings, making “inappropriate noises, heehawing like a donkey� and making “derogatory comments.�

The shooter’s brother said, “he has spoke [sic] on it as best he could in the courts, and they denied all rights to the access of protection and he took it upon himself to go to war and end the issue.�

We also learned yesterday about an aborted “large-scale shooting rampage� at the Super Bowl from an individual who “purchased an AR-15 assault rifle from a Phoenix-area gun store on Jan. 29� along with 200 rounds of ammunition, and “planned a massacre as a form of revenge against the Tempe, Ariz. City Council – because it overwhelmingly denied a liquor license for his restaurant.�

In a letter mailed before he decided not to carry out the attack, the gun buyer said that “I cannot outvote, outspend, outtax or outincarcerate my enemies … but for a brief moment I can outgun them.�

These two stories raise a number of issues – the weakness of our gun laws nationally, as well as in most of the states; the easy accessibility of assault rifles and large stores of ammunition; the non-deterrent effect of police carrying guns and the disregard by those who are willing to be “suicide shooters� for their own lives; and the highly-charged level of controversy involved in much of local government activity.

This last point deserves some more attention. One of the first times I got involved in a controversy with the gun lobby was when, as Mayor of Fort Wayne, Indiana, I suggested that individuals not be allowed to bring guns into our City-County building. (The County, which owned the building, had just banned guns from the County Courthouse and I argued there were just as many contentious issues being discussed and decided by the legislative and administrative parts of local government as by the judicial part.)

The gun lobby saw this suggestion as an attack on their “Second Amendment rights� and responded strongly. As someone who had received death threats and been called a “dictator� because of other government issues, I knew that there were a lot of people who I did not want to see carrying guns into city meetings and the offices of city employees.

These incidents all highlight the tensions involved when individuals argue that their “personal liberty� outweighs the rule of law and trumps community policy as decided by our governmental systems.

These tensions are part of the legal debate about the Second Amendment in the D.C. v. Heller case pending in the U.S. Supreme Court. In the brief filed for Heller on Monday, his lawyers argue in favor of the “individual use of Second-Amendment-protected arms to check despotism� and the importance of “retaining the ability to resist tyranny.�

The killer in Kirkwood and the would-be shooter at the Super Bowl both thought they had to act to “check despotism� and “resist tyranny.� But encouraging easier access to dangerous weapons by dangerous people puts us all at risk. We need to value the rule of law along with the claims of individual liberty or we all suffer.

(Note to readers: This entry, along with past entries, has been co-posted on bradycampaign.org/blog and the Huffington Post.)

I often hear the argument that we should just “enforce the laws on the books� in order to reduce gun violence. That’s important, but we also need to be aware how few laws we “have on the books� and figure out how to make what laws we do have more effective.

That’s why, last week, the Brady Campaign announced a new system of scoring the 50 states according to the strength or weakness of their gun laws.

For the year 2007, each state earned a score and rank according to a comprehensive inventory of 42 gun regulations, divided into five categories. We assigned greater and lesser point values to each kind of law based on our Campaign Against Illegal Guns, as well as our 30 years of leadership in the gun violence prevention movement.

Under this new system, states can earn up to 100 points. Some may find it surprising, however, that two-thirds of all states scored less than 20 points out of 100 in 2007. In fact, almost half the states scored 10 points or less.

Given the 30,000 gun deaths every year in America, these scores shouldn’t be surprising at all. Instead, they illustrate that many states don’t have even a bare minimum of effective laws to combat gun trafficking, strengthen Brady background checks, or restrict access to military-style assault weapons.

States like South Carolina, Tennessee, Nevada, Florida and Louisiana, for example, have virtually no laws on the books that effectively combat firearm trafficking or prevent dangerous people from gaining easy access to dangerous weapons.

California is at the other end of the scale. Ranking first in the nation, it has laws such as mandatory background checks on all firearm purchases, a “one-handgun-a-month� law to stop bulk purchases that feed the illegal gun market, and other effective laws that help prevent gun trafficking.

What’s more, California further strengthened its laws last year by enacting legislation to help police identify crime guns by using new “microstamping� technology. This legislation gives law enforcement a powerful investigative tool to solve more gun crimes and apprehend more armed criminals and gang members by identifying a gun used in crime – even without the gun.

Part of our mission at the Brady Campaign is to help people evaluate the strength of the gun laws in their states. With this information, citizens can become active in their own communities and work to hold elected officials accountable.

Gun trafficking can be reduced, the illegal gun trade can be cut, and dangerous weapons can be kept out of the hands of dangerous people. Passage of common-sense legislation at the national level – like the NICS Improvement Act, for example – and “microstamping� in California, shows that America is turning a corner on the gun issue.

When families and law enforcement come together, elected officials listen. Parents and police can demand strong gun laws in their communities. The Brady Campaign’s new state scorecards can help.

Always remember: sensible gun laws save lives. I hope you will use these scorecards as a resource in your area, and join us in our work to make America’s neighborhoods and communities safe from gun violence.

(Note to readers: This entry, along with past entries, has been co-posted on bradycampaign.org/blog and the Huffington Post.)