Fact Checker: The NRA’s love-hate relationship with a database for background checks

March 03, 2018

Democracy Dies in Darkness

The truth behind the rhetoric

The NRA’s love-hate relationship with a database for background checks

After the high school shooting in Parkland, Fla., NRA spokeswoman Dana Loesch was on TV lamenting that states don’t send all the required criminal and mental health records to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS). Because of these gaps, she said, many people legally barred from buying guns can get them anyway. “It’s not federally mandated,” she said on CNN. “Politicians could change this today; they could change it tomorrow,” she said on ABC News.

We did some digging and found that politicians did try to change this, 25 years ago, with a federal mandate. And they were blocked — largely by the NRA. The group funded several lawsuits challenging the Brady gun law, which created the NICS, and filed an amicus brief in the Supreme Court arguing that the entire law had to be chucked or federalism would implode in the United States. NRA attorneys said it was unconstitutional to impose a federal mandate on local officials that required them to conduct background checks in the days before NICS was up and running. The Supreme Court agreed and struck down that part of the Brady gun law. Fast-forward 25 years: Loesch complains that nothing in the law requires local officials to feed the background check database (“it’s not federally mandated”). We gave her an Upside-Down Pinocchio for this flip-flop.

Operation Dumbo Drop, except the elephant is $1.7 billion in cash

Every now and then we turn our withering gaze upon ourselves. We taste our own medicine. We take a long, hard look in the mirror and say, “Physician, heal thyself!” We fact-check The Fact Checker. Naturally, it all started with a tweet from President Trump. He said no one had investigated the Obama administration for sending $1.7 billion in cash to Iran. We responded with our own tweet, correcting the president. Judging by the Twitter responses, the Iran question was perhaps not as settled as we thought, so we set out to investigate our own claim. The timing and circumstances of the $1.7 billion cash drop were certainly eyebrow-raising, but our review showed that the payment did not violate the law. (No Pinocchios for us this time!)

Bonus: Can you picture a young Donald Trump whiling away his youth in Cincinnati? Neither could we, but it turns out he did spend some time there in the 1960s, working on a property his father had bought. Trump suggested the investment yielded around $6 million in the end, but this, and other parts of his Cincinnati memories, appear to be exaggerations.

A note about the cat GIFs: We invariably get emails every week from readers with strong opinions about the cat GIFs — both pro-GIF and anti-GIF. It’s about 50-50. This has been going on for some time, and we figured we would finally address the controversy. We love cats. Glenn Kessler grew up with four or five cats in the house, including a white, long-haired Persian named Cocaine. (It was innocent. He was loved.) This newsletter was founded by Michelle Ye Hee Lee, a Fact Checker alumna whose cats, Penny and Liddy, have their own Instagram account. Salvador Rizzo has a tuxedo cat named Moonshine, whose fifth birthday is tomorrow. Meg Kelly … it’s unclear how Meg Kelly made it through the hiring process, since she’s allergic to cats. But she’s onboard with the GIFs.

We’re always looking for fact-check suggestions.

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Scroll down for this week’s Pinocchio roundup.

—Salvador Rizzo