NICS Ops Report - Interesting Metrics

[Niner4Tango]

There is a lot of misinformation, urban legend etc. around the NICS stats. Here is a great resource for NICS ops, including background check volume, denials, appeals, and reasons for being prohibited. I am not in favor of universal background checks. We need to get our facts straight though.

A couple of things jump out at me:

Total Denials: 899,099
This is from Nov '98 to Dec '11 (not 1.5M like Obama said in a speech recently)

Denials as a percent of Transactions: 1.4%
In 2011 there were 16,454,951 transactions and 78,211 denials. Most people probably know whether they will pass. We also don't know how many purchases were attempted but were not processed by the dealer due to disqualifying answers on the 4473

Of all Denials, how many were Reversed: 4%
Of 78,211 denials, 17,203 were appealed and 3236 were overturned. Note this is a much lower number of denial reversals than you sometimes see.

Link to the report is here, take a look. What jumps out at you?

http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/nics/reports/2011-operations-report/operations-report-2011

 

[jason_iowa]

almost 30% of appeals are overturned though. So the 4% can be deceiving as well

 

[Tom Servo]

It's interesting to see the factors in denials:

I'd like to know what percentage of the 540,210 folks denied for prior crimes are due to missing paperwork errors. I've known several people to be denied based on 30-40 year old information and transcription errors. It's really difficult to get those fixed when Sheriff Joe Bob has to send someone digging through moldy file cabinets in the basement to find out that a person had charges lowered or dropped in 1974.

 

[Spats McGee]

What the heck is the "Federally Denied Persons File?"

 

[Niner4Tango]

A footnote on Pg 17:

³ The Federally Denied Persons File is compiled of individuals that are predetermined to have firearm prohibitions without listing the specific
category.

Hmm...

 

[Spats McGee]

Thank you, Niner. That footnote does seem a bit, umm, odd.

 

[Niner4Tango]

Who are the Prohibited persons?

Another thing that jumped out at me is the category of active records in the NICS database. Of over 7M records of prohibited persons almost 5M of them are for illegal aliens! That's a lot of data and data ain't cheap.

When comparing the table of records to the table of reasons for denia,l posted by Tom above, there is a real disconnect. Compare the high number of denials due to "convicted of a crime" v. the small ratio of records for that category. And denials due to "illegal alien" are really small compared to the large number of records kept.

There has been a lot of talk lately about tracking "adjudicated mentally defective" persons. But there are 1.4M records that only prevented 7879 purchases.

This is very low yield for both "mentally defective" and "illegal aliens" - a really inefficient process. Makes you wonder if there is a better way...