NRA, Democrats agree on background-check bill
WASHINGTON -- Senior Democrats have reached agreement with the National Rifle Association on what could be the first federal gun-control legislation since 1994, a measure to significantly strengthen the national system that checks the backgrounds of gun buyers.
The sensitive talks began in April, days after a mentally ill gunman killed 32 students and teachers at Virginia Tech University.
The shooter, Seung Hui Cho, had been judicially ordered to submit to a psychiatric evaluation, which should have disqualified him from buying handguns. But the state of Virginia never forwarded that information to the federal National Instant Check System, and the massacre exposed a loophole in the 13-year-old background-check program.
Under the agreement, participating states would be given monetary enticements for the first time to keep the federal background database up to date, and penalties for failing to comply.
To sign on to the deal, the powerful gun lobby won significant concessions from Democratic negotiators in weeks of painstaking talks.
Individuals with minor infractions in their pasts could petition their states to have their names removed from the federal database, and about 83,000 military veterans, put into the system by the Department of Veterans Affairs in 2000 for alleged mental health reasons, would have a chance to clean their records.
The federal government would be permanently barred from charging gun buyers or sellers a fee for their background checks. In addition, faulty records such as duplicative names or expunged convictions would have to be scrubbed from the database.
Representative Carolyn McCarthy, Democrat of New York, had been pushing similar legislation for years. But her reputation as a staunch opponent of the gun lobby -- she came to Congress to promote gun control after her husband was gunned down in a massacre on the Long Island Rail Road -- ruined any chance of a deal with the NRA.
Chris W. Cox, the NRA's chief lobbyist, said yesterday that the organization will strongly support the legislation as written.
"We've been on record for decades for keeping firearms out of the hands of the mentally adjudicated. It's not only good policy, it's good politics," he said. 