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The U.S. Supreme Court delivered a major victory to gun control advocates on Monday. The 5-4 ruling allows strict enforcement of the federal ban on gun “straw purchases,” or one person buying a gun for another.
The federal law on background checks requires federally licensed gun dealers to verify the identity of buyers and submit their names to a federal database to weed out felons, those with a history of mental illness and others barred from gun ownership.
Writing for the majority, Justice Elena Kagan said that the plaintive’s arguement would completely gut the twin purposes of the law — to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and others who should not have them, and to assist law enforcement authorities in investigating serious crimes.
Kagan noted that according to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, nearly half of its gun trafficking investigations involve straw purchasers. In the first six months of the 2014 fiscal year, there were 42 prosecutions in which the straw purchase violation was the lead charge, and many others in which it was a charge secondary to another crime, according to the Syracuse University Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse.
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