Background Check: Fill & Download for Free

Writing as a resident of Denver, Colorado.Yesterday I decided to buy a shotgun for shooting clay pigeons. I went to Big 5, asked some questions about the different guns and handled a few to see how they felt. After I picked one I had to fill out some background check paperwork and pay. The employee said it’s illegal to do a background check without a transaction having occurred. An employee went into a back office and submitted the background check. She said it’d be about an hour, so I left with my friend to grab some lunch.When I got back, the background check was complete so I took the shotgun out to my car, drove to the range, and went shooting. The whole process was about an hour and a half.

What? I just bought a car Saturday. No background check, no insurance, no ID. Completely legal. He handed me the title, I loaded the car on my trailer and towed it home.I bought a gun last week too. Couldn’t Take it home until I had given my ID to the counterperson, filled out the background check form and waited for the results to return. If I wanted to buy it on the weekend, tough shit because there’s nobody to do the background check since the gun store is closed.Looks to me like it’s a lot easier to buy a car.

I have to assume by your question that you have never actually been to a gun show yourself. It’s pretty obvious.If you do ever go, you will see people selling large numbers of guns, or at least have quite a few on display. Those are federally licensed dealers, called FFL’s. Most of the time they also have gun stores. Every single sale that a FFL goes through, must have a background check which means the buyer fills out a form, the dealer calls into the phone number for the background check (the NICS), and generally it is a 10 minute wait until a yes or no answer is given. If you fail your background check, they do NOT sell you the gun. Regardless of what somebody has told you, they do not do that. In fact, if you just seem suspicious but you still pass a background check, they will still most likely not sell you a gun. If they do sell a gun to someone that fails a background check, they will lose their license and likely be facing federal charges.The only sales that are not covered by federal law that require a background check, are sales between two private individuals from that same state and they are in that state at the time, face to face. Many states still require a background check for those sales as well. This would be much easier if the NICS Database was available to private individuals, but it is not. Any sale that involves people from other states or from out of state, still require a FFL and a background check. Anyone telling you otherwise is either lying or has no idea. I’m sorry, but there are a lot of liars from the gun control crowd that just want to scare you into falling in line. The same goes for internet sales. The gun would be shipped to an FFL with a background check before the buyer can take possession.There is no such thing as the “Gun Show Loophole.”One quick edit: The NICS database is NOT available to individuals without an FFL. Meaning that if I wanted to sell you a gun, and i wanted to run a background check on you, I couldn’t do it. We’d have to go to an FFL, pay them a fee to run it first. This was on purpose. It is a good and a bad thing. Bad, because I can’t run a check to sell you a gun. Good, because how many anti-gun advocates would run random people through the search, and then literally have gun owners “swatted”? Obviously not very many would do that, but a few would, and it would end up with people being killed. That is a bad thing.