Two months after the Tucson shooting in which six were killed and U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D-AZ) was seriously injured, President Obama has called for better background checks of gun buyers. Without naming shooter Jared Loughner, Obama writes in the Arizona Daily Star that “a man our Army rejected as unfit for service; a man one of our colleges deemed too unstable for studies; a man apparently bent on violence, was able to walk into a store and buy a gun.”
The President says improvements to the National Instant Criminal Background Check System haven’t been properly implemented because the system relies on data supplied by states “but that data is often incomplete and inadequate. We must do better.” Obama calls for rewarding states that provide the best data and says, “We should make the system faster and nimbler. We should provide an instant, accurate, comprehensive and consistent system for background checks to sellers who want to do the right thing, and make sure that criminals can’t escape it.” He says that, “If we’re serious about keeping guns away from someone who’s made up his mind to kill, then we can’t allow a situation where a responsible seller denies him a weapon at one store, but he effortlessly buys the same gun someplace else.”