By Asha Rangappa

Dear Listener,

Since the 2020 election, Republican-led state legislatures — including states that were at the center of former President Trump’s election challenges like Georgia, Pennsylvania, and Arizona — have forged full speed ahead with a spate of laws designed to restrict access to voting. In fact, the Brennan Center’s voting bills tracker has identified 253 bills in 43 states that restrict access to voting, all of which have been introduced since February of this year. The underlying rationale for these bills is protecting “election integrity” — a catchphrase that has come to represent the unfounded allegation that millions of people are voting illegally. However, the party’s reaction to two bills passed by the House this week — one that would create universal background checks for the purchase or transfer of firearms, and another that would close the so-called “Charleston loophole” and extend the background check review period to ten days — demonstrates that their obsession with “integrity” doesn’t extend equally to the exercise of all constitutional rights, even when the consequences can be fatal.

First, some background. Under federal law, individuals are ineligible to purchase firearms if they meet one of nine criteria. These include individuals who are: 1) felons; 2) fugitives; 3) drug addicts or unlawful drug users; 4) persons committed to mental institutions or have been adjudicated as “mentally defective”; 5) persons dishonorably discharged from the armed forces; 6) persons who have renounced their U.S. citizenship; 7) undocumented immigrants or nonimmigrants; 8) persons subject to certain domestic violence restraining orders; and 9) persons convicted of misdemeanor offenses of domestic violence. Sellers determine whether a person attempting to obtain a firearm meets one of these criteria by running their information through the National Instant Criminal Background Check system (NICS), a database maintained by the FBI.