The Obama administration removed the names of over 500,000 individuals with active arrest warrants from the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, according to The Daily Wire.
From Conservative Tribune:
The deletion of the names was first reported by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, who had originally pinned the change on the Trump administration.
“A little-noticed mandate from the Trump administration has cleared the way for some people with outstanding arrest warrants to purchase guns, a change that worries law enforcement officials who say it could be allowing dangerous criminals to arm themselves,” The Journal-Constitution reported last October.
“Six months after the U.S. Department of Justice issued a memo redefining who is a fugitive from justice — and cannot have a gun — more than a half a million names have been dropped from a national law enforcement data base used to determine who may purchase a firearms and or obtain a carry permit, according to FBI records provided to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.”
The title of the article was equally unsubtle: “Trump Administration change allows some facing arrest to buy guns.” Needless to say, Senate Democrats were interesting in asking Deputy Director Bowdich why the Trump administration would make such a move.
“It’s my understanding that under federal law fugitives cannot legally purchase or possess guns,” California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the Democrats’ all-star gun-grabber in the upper chamber, queried Bowdich.
“We’ve heard from local law enforcement that the Justice Department has issued a memo that forced the FBI NICS background check database to drop more than 500,000 names of fugitives with outstanding arrest warrants because it was uncertain whether those fugitives had fled across state lines.”
“Mr. Bowdich, can you describe why this determination was made by the Justice Department?” she asked.
Sen. Feinstein thought she’d scored a “gotcha” moment. And lo and behold, she had. Just not quite in the way she had imagined.
“That was a decision that was made under the previous administration,” Bowdich replied.
“It was the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel that reviewed the law and believed that it needed to be interpreted so that if someone was a fugitive in a state, there had to be indications that they had crossed state lines.”
