LA Court Lost 147,000 Felony Records

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Background checks are built on an assumption most people never question — that the records feeding the system are actually complete. Turns out, for roughly four decades, Los Angeles County's courts weren't submitting felony convictions to the California DOJ. Not some of them. A lot of them.

"The court has identified approximately 380,000 instances with convictions where the case's ADR was not successfully reported to the DOJ."

That's not a glitch — that's the system not working for forty-plus years across the most populous county in the country. Every NICS check run against one of those names returned clean, because there was nothing to return. Any dealer in any state, including Idaho, would have seen the same result.

The part that should bother you: there's no announced plan to cross-reference those 147,000 felony convictions against actual firearm purchase records. They're transmitting the data now, which stops new gaps from forming — but what happened during the gap is apparently not anyone's urgent problem.

California built one of the most involved gun purchase processes in the country and the foundation it rested on had a 147,000-case hole in it. That's worth sitting with the next time someone cites NICS denial rates as proof the system is working.

Curious whether anyone here has actually had a NICS check come back delayed or denied for a records issue — either on a purchase or when helping someone at the counter — and what the resolution process looked like.

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Read the full article in The Handbook → | By Steve Duskett