But President Lyndon B. Johnson was not happy. He had wanted to require a registry for all guns and licenses for gun owners.
“The voices that blocked these safeguards were not the voices of an aroused nation,” he lamented at the signing ceremony. “They were the voices of a powerful lobby, a gun lobby, that has prevailed for the moment in an election year.” (Time magazine was equally lukewarm, calling the measure “better than nothing.”)
Over the decades that followed, the cycle would repeat. High-profile shootings and mass murders would spur calls for tougher gun control measures — from bans of assault weapons to curbs on ammunition — and provoke defiance from the gun lobby.
While gun control advocates view no single measure as a cure-all, they see tightening background checks as one of the most basic steps to diminish gun violence. Most Americans support such efforts, polls show, but the National Rifle Association portrays them as an affront to the Second Amendment.
The debate was stoked anew after the weekend shootings that left 31 dead in Dayton, Ohio, and El Paso, Texas. Democratic congressional leaders pressed for action on background checks Monday, but President Donald Trump, a staunch NRA ally, linked the topic to immigration, most likely dooming it.
In February, the House passed its first significant gun control measure — background checks for a greater number of gun purchases — in a quarter-century.
Gabrielle Giffords, the former congresswoman who survived an assassination attempt, called the measure a “testament to courage.” The NRA derided it as “a feel-good bill at best, a failure-in-waiting at worst.” It never went anywhere in the Senate.
The divide on gun policy is evident across the country. Many blue states are enacting stricter background checks and so-called red flag measures, which allow law enforcement officers to seize guns from those deemed to pose an imminent threat, while some red states have made it easier to carry concealed weapons.
Tougher federal restrictions could ensure more national consistency. Trump has signed modest legislation to prod more reporting to the background check system but also reversed an Obama-era measure that used Social Security records to help flag people with disqualifying mental health issues.
After the killings of John F. Kennedy, Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1960s, Johnson settled for legislation that “falls short,” he said at the time, even though it did tightly restrict interstate firearms sales. While gun buyers had to fill out questionnaires, there was no attempt at verification.
The current federal background check system stemmed from the so-called Brady Bill, named for James Brady, a press secretary to Ronald Reagan who was left disabled by an assassination attempt against the former president.
The 1993 legislation, which was supported by Reagan, set up the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, known as NICS. It was intended to screen out purchasers indicted or convicted of serious crimes, fugitives, drug addicts, veterans who were dishonorably discharged or those “adjudicated as a mental defective or committed to a mental institution.”
Last year, nearly 100,000 firearm sales were blocked, according to the FBI, out of more than 26 million checks.
But not all purchases require checks. One of the House bills passed in February would require background checks at gun shows and on internet sites like Armslist, where private buyers and sellers can arrange to meet in person to complete a sale, or ship a rifle or shotgun within a state with no background check.
An analysis of Armslist purchases by Everytown for Gun Safety, a gun control group, found nearly 1.2 million ads last year “for firearm sales where no background check” was required.
In a statement, Armslist said: “Many people choose to do background checks even when they are not legally required. Furthermore, just because a user posts something on the internet, does not mean a sale takes place.”
The business also said traveling to a dealer for a background check imposed hardships “urban dwellers won’t understand.”
Gun control advocates point to cases in which assailants with disqualifying backgrounds were nevertheless able to buy guns online.
A second House bill would increase the waiting period after a potential buyer does not immediately pass a background check. Under current law, those who do not immediately pass a background check can buy a gun after three days if the dealer has not been notified by the government why the check was held up. This circumstance, known as a default proceed, allowed Dylann Roof, who killed nine at a church in Charleston, South Carolina, in 2015, to purchase a gun.
There is evidence that the current system, flawed as it is, has had an effect. A 2005 study by researchers at California State University, Chico; and New Mexico State University found that “states with less stringent background check policies also had higher rates of firearms homicides,” while a 2008 study by researchers at the Medical College of Wisconsin found that background checks were associated with a more than 20% drop in firearm suicide and homicide rates among adults age 21 and older.
But researchers say that a tighter system with greater access to records and a broadening of the crimes that get flagged would make the system more effective.
Background checks are “clearly effective in reducing risk of violence among the people whose purchases are denied,” said Dr. Garen J. Wintemute, an emergency room physician and director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California, Davis. “But there are problems in design and implementation that limit their effectiveness” and can prevent an effect from showing up in crime data.
“All of these problems are fixable,” he added. Among other things, he believes that restricting sales to people convicted of violent misdemeanors and repeat drunken driving charges could improve the system.
The debate on background checks has largely played out at the state level recently. A number of states have moved to require background checks for private gun sales. California, New York and seven other states mandate that any transfer of a firearm be completed through a licensed dealer, while Maryland, Massachusetts and 10 other states require permits for at least some types of firearms.
Such measures are highly unlikely at the federal level, though, unless Democrats control all branches of government. But Trump did leave an opening Monday for the red flag laws that give police extra powers to confiscate firearms.
The issue was highlighted over the weekend because the suspect in the Dayton shooting, Connor Betts, reportedly had been investigated for making a “hit list” of students while in high school and talked of killing himself and others.
Red flag laws have been gaining ground in some states. Connecticut was the first to enact such a law in 1999, after a mass shooting at the state lottery headquarters by a disgruntled employee with a history of psychiatric problems. In 2013, The New York Times examined gun seizures under the Connecticut law, finding that in a single year there were 180 confiscations, almost 40% from those with serious mental illness.
Whether an actual proposal in Congress emerges remains to be seen, though gun control groups have had some successes of late, and the NRA is beset by internal turmoil.
Laura Cutilletta, managing director of the Giffords Law Center, said that since the 2012 massacre of 26 children and teachers at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, “there has been a steady climb upwards, and we’re not sliding back” when it comes to gun safety laws.
“Each time the public becomes outraged, the momentum pushes us forward,” she said. “It’s just very unfortunate that it takes mass shootings to make that happen.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.