On February 28, 1994, the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act took effect, providing a nationwide system for background checks on gun sales. The Brady law standardized what had been a state-by-state patchwork of vetting prospective gun owners, and introduced background check systems to 32 states.
Brady requires gun stores and other federally licensed firearms dealers to check a gun buyer’s background, drug use, and criminal history through the FBI. Brady doesn’t apply to firearm sales that don’t go through a licensed dealer — at gun shows and yard sales, between friends and strangers, or arranged through online sites like Armslist and GunBroker.
Dozens of bills have been introduced in Congress that tried to narrow or close the private sales loophole. Twenty states have passed laws requiring background checks on every gun sale, but 30 states have not. In those states, someone can buy a gun from a stranger with no vetting.
The Trace notes that the underage Columbine killers are among several mass shooters who got guns in private sales. States without universal background checks are among the states with the highest rates of gun death. Researchers estimate that nearly a quarter of gun sales still occur without background checks.
The roots of the private sales loophole can be found in the 1968 Gun Control Act, which required people “engaged in the business” of selling guns to become licensed dealers. “Engaged in the business” was defined as someone who sold guns “with the principal objective of livelihood and profit.” The law didn’t specify a minimum number of transactions that would trigger the licensing requirement.
“This is a compromise that the NRA demanded,” said Jim Kessler of the center-left think tank Third Way, who was a legislative aide for then-Rep. Chuck Schumer in the early 1990s. “It’s like, ‘Look, if someone has a gun and they live out in the country and they want to sell their own shotgun, should they really have to go through all this red tape? Or if they want to sell it to their cousin or give it away?’” These casual sales weren’t seen as contributors to the violent crime plaguing cities in the 1980s and ‘90s, he said.
The year Brady was enacted, there were more than 240,000 dealers in the U.S., nearly five times the 50,000 in business today.
Under Brady, gun buyers still must attest to their eligibility, but gun dealers are required to verify that information, forcing prohibited purchasers who’d normally lie on the form to find another source. “And that source could be a gun store that’s dirty, a set of straw buyers who will pass the background check and then just transfer the gun to somebody else, or a variety of places where you can do private sales,” Kessler said.