The Gun-Show Loophole Is Not Gone

You heard it here first.

Homer Simpson protests the five-day waiting period, 1997.

A year or two from now, you’re going to hear some politician say that we really need to close the loophole for background checks at gun shows. Your first thought will be “Wow, I’ve been hearing about that gun-show loophole for a long time.” You’ve been hearing about it, in fact, since the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act passed in 1993. That bill required background checks on firearms purchases. It also required a five-day waiting period, but that, regrettably, was allowed to expire in 1998. The definitive commentary on the five-day waiting period was an episode of The Simpsons in which Homer tries to purchase a gun. When the retail clerk tells him he’ll have to wait five days, Homer complains, “Five days? But I’m mad now!”

But I digress.

The Brady bill required background checks on firearms purchases, but only for sales from professionally licensed gun retailers. It didn’t require them for sales from hobbyists, or people who managed to pass themselves off as hobbyists. Thus was born the gun-show loophole.

Your second thought, when you hear a politician sometime in the future say let’s close that infernal gun-show loophole, will be: “Wait. Didn’t Joe Biden close that loophole in 2024?” Because that’s what most of the news stories say about a final regulation issued this week by the Bureau of Alcohol Firearms, Tobacco, and Explosives. But the regulation doesn’t close the loophole; it merely shrinks it. That’s the subject of my latest New Republic piece. You can read it here.