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Florida and background checks

A big news item (and a tactic in Florida's gubernatorial election) is that the state supposedly issued concealed carry permits for a year without doing background checks. But read the Washington Post headline and notice that it says they did not "complete" them for a year.

I just received an email from Marion Hammer of United Sportsmen of Florida which explains:

"The Division of Licensing under the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services (DOACS) did, in fact, do background checks on applicants for licenses to carry concealed weapons or firearms.

Background checks were done through FCIC (Florida Criminal Information Computer system) and NCIC (Nation Criminal Information Computer system -- the national FBI fingerprint data base) and they also did a NICS check (National Instant Check System), which is the name-based background check system.

The NICS system is the same system used by retail firearms dealers to do background checks when a person buys a firearm.

ALL THREE BACKGROUND CHECKS WERE DONE.

During the time the employee failed to do her job, approximately 350,000 applicants for carry licenses were processed. Of those 350,000, 365 had a disqualifier based on the NICS background check.

The employee should have uploaded those 365 into the internal computer system to stop the processing of those applications. She did not. So those 365 applicants got their licenses anyhow....

When the Division discovered the problem, the employee was let go. The Division then ran new background checks on all 365 applicants who initially had NICS name-based disqualifiers. Of those 365, 74 were cleared and 291 still had disqualifiers, so their licenses to carry firearms were immediately suspended."

Interesting notes: supposed disqualifiers were found for around a tenth of a percent of applicants, suggesting the system is self-policing. Second, nearly a quarter of the disqualifiers were false positives. (Actually, it may be more, since we don't know how many errors slipped through the second review. I seem to recall hearing that the error rate was more like 50%. Considering that Brady Campaign is stating that about 127,000 sales are blocked per year, that suggests that, even using the percent, the annual number of erroneous denials is about 30,000)/