[Congressional Record Volume 169, Number 146 (Monday, September 11, 2023)]
[Senate]
[Pages S4345-S4347]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]



                           Background Checks

  Mr. President, in May of 2019, Leilah Hernandez had her quinceanera. 
She was in a bedazzled green gown. She looked absolutely magnificent. 
She was having a great sophomore year in high school. She was playing 
basketball, No. 23. She had a lot of friends.
  One friend said that Leilah is just one of these people ``full of joy 
and happiness. She knew how to make somebody's bad day turn into a good 
day.''
  In September of that year, 2019, Leilah went to a car dealership in 
the Midland-Odessa area of Texas. Her 18-year-old brother Nathan was 
buying a truck. This was a big deal for this family. I don't know if it 
was the whole family, but her mom was there, Nathan was there, she was 
there, and her 9-year-old brother was there.
  And I believe that they were emerging from the dealership. They heard 
gunshots. Her mother took the younger brother--the 9-year-old--and they 
ducked underneath a car. Nathan, 18, all he could do was just wrap his 
hands around Leilah. But the shooting was relentless. Nathan was hit in 
the arm, but Leilah was hit closer to the neck. Leilah's last words in 
the embrace of her brother were ``Help me, help me.''
  She was one of seven who died in the Midland-Odessa mass shooting. 
Thirty-two people were shot. A lot of them, like Nathan, survived, many 
with injuries that will impact them for the rest of their life. But 
Leilah Hernandez, just a few months from her quinceanera, died that 
day.
  The young man who shot her was ineligible to own a weapon. He had 
serious mental illness--serious enough that he was on the list of 
individuals who was prohibited from buying a weapon. He had tried to 
buy a weapon, but he had been denied when he tried to do it at a 
licensed gun dealer. He is one of millions of Americans who have been 
stopped from buying a gun because they are a felon or they are 
seriously mentally ill. But this young man was still able, rather 
easily, to get a weapon.
  Why is that? Well, it is because many of our weapons in this country 
are sold without background checks.
  What happened in this case? How did this young man with a serious 
history of mental illness get his hands on a powerful weapon that 
allowed him to kill Leilah and six others?
  Well, the story runs through a man named Marcus Braziel. Marcus 
Braziel was a gun dealer. No doubt, he was a gun dealer. He might not 
have had a brick-and-mortar store, but Mr. Braziel was regularly 
selling guns. In a 3-year period of time, he bought 90-some-odd guns 
and resold 70 of them.

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  In the court papers that were part of his arrest and conviction, he 
admitted that he routinely bought firearm firing mechanisms, termed 
``lower receivers,'' and used milling equipment to build them into 
full-fledged guns, and then sold the completed weapons, each one for 
about a profit of $100 to $200.
  He listed his firearms on armslist.com, and then he conducted the 
sales in the parking lot of a local sporting goods store or sometimes 
out of his garage.
  He was a gun dealer, but he never performed background checks because 
he didn't get licensed. And when he advertised a weapon online, Seth 
Ator, prohibited from buying a gun from a brick-and-mortar store, 
answered the ad, bought the weapon, and used it to kill Leilah 
Hernandez and shoot 32 other people.
  This, unfortunately, is not the exception. This is, in America, the 
rule today. Twenty-two percent of gun owners report that they obtained 
their weapons without a background check, and an analysis of gun sale 
ads from 2018 to 2020 revealed that the majority of ads were being 
placed by people like Mr. Braziel, unlicensed sellers not required to 
do background checks.
  So what that means is that there are tens of thousands of guns, 
perhaps more, in this country, every single year, being not just sold 
without background checks but being sold to individuals who are 
prohibited from buying those weapons, because that is exactly where 
those people go. People like Seth Ator, the shooter in Midland-Odessa, 
they know that this black market exists. They know there are people on 
armslist.com who will willingly sell them weapons without a background 
check. So, when they get stopped from buying a gun at a gun store, they 
go and buy one online.
  That is the bad news.
  The good news is that Republicans and Democrats in the Senate and 
House recognized this problem, and as part of the Bipartisan Safer 
Communities Act, last year, we updated the definition of a gun dealer 
to make it crystal clear that people like Mr. Braziel need to get a 
license and they need to conduct background checks. What we did was to 
basically clarify that it doesn't need to be your full-time job. But so 
long as you are selling guns predominantly for a profit, you have to 
get licensed. You have to perform background checks.
  The Biden administration, 2 weeks ago, released a draft rule 
implementing that change that we voted for on a bipartisan basis in the 
Senate. An analysis of the statutory change that we voted for and the 
rule that the Biden administration has proposed suggests that up to 
328,000 additional dealers could be required to perform background 
checks. Now, even if those dealers are only conducting a handful of 
sales a year--and most of these are probably conducting dozens of sales 
a year, either at gun shows or online on sites like armslist.com--we 
are talking about millions of guns--millions of guns that right now are 
being sold outside the background check system and that will now be 
sold inside the background check system.
  That is a big deal, because that shooter in Midland is not the 
exception. Like I said, unfortunately, he is the rule. So by having so 
many more guns go through the background check system and really 
closing off the ways that felons, criminals, and people with serious 
mental illness can buy guns, you are saving lives.
  Maybe Leilah Hernandez would be alive today. She probably would be if 
this rule had been in place and Mr. Braziel had looked at that 
definition and come to the conclusion that he needed to get licensed. 
Admittedly, today, the definition is a little fuzzy, and without a rule 
making it clear what constitutes being a dealer and what does not, it 
is even harder for individuals out there to decide whether they need to 
be licensed or not.
  Now Mr. Braziel's case is a pretty clear one. He obviously should 
have known that he was a gun dealer. That is why he got prosecuted and 
put in jail for the actions that led up to the murder of Leilah 
Hernandez. But many other Americans may not know that they need to be 
licensed. Now, with this rule that the Biden administration has put 
forward, they will know, and they will get licensed.
  And so I hope that my colleagues will learn about this rule, that my 
Republican colleagues will understand how far it goes and how far it 
does not go. This does not mean that an individual who is just 
selling a gun to a family member is going to have to get licensed. That 
individual is not a dealer. It doesn't mean that someone who is just 
liquidating their collection of firearms has to be licensed. That 
person is not a gun dealer.

  The rule makes it very clear who is a dealer based upon their desire 
to earn a profit, based upon whether they have the trappings of a 
business, based upon the places where they are selling weapons, where 
they are more likely to be strangers, on whom they would need to have a 
background check to understand whether they are selling to a 
responsible individual. Those people have to be licensed. But there are 
lots of people who are selling one or two or three guns a year who 
likely don't have to be licensed under this rule.
  So I hope my colleagues will do their own research, not just listen 
to the spin of advocacy groups, because I think if you do your own 
research, you will find out that this is exactly what Americans want us 
to be doing. They want us to be making sure that when there are 
commercial transactions of weapons, there is a background check.
  By the way, the background check takes 5 minutes. When it doesn't 
take 5 minutes, that generally is for a reason--that the individual 
likely has a more complicated mental health or criminal history that 
has to be unwound.
  So I am really excited for the Biden administration's very 
appropriate steps to implement this provision of the Bipartisan Safer 
Communities Act, and I would just finally note that it is the latest in 
a series of announcements making clear that the Bipartisan Safer 
Communities Act has had a substantial and important impact. Since the 
passage of the BSCA, almost 1,000 transactions of weapons to young 
buyers--those under 21--have been denied. We put in place enhanced 
background checks for 18-, 19-, and 20-year-olds when they are buying 
rifles and assault weapons. And that additional background check has 
already identified 1,000 people all across the country, young people 
who would have gotten the weapon had it not been for the advanced 
background check, but we found out they had a disqualifying record--a 
serious mental illness or undiscovered criminal conviction--and they 
didn't get the weapon.
  That is really good news.
  Second, more than 100 defendants all across the country have been 
charged with new BSCA violations of gun trafficking. Gun trafficking 
wasn't a Federal crime until we passed that law, and now it is. Over 
100 cases have been brought against defendants for violations of 
trafficking firearms. Prosecutions against unlicensed dealers, even 
before the Biden administration's announcement of the rule, were up by 
52 percent.
  Lastly, the administration has made 49 awards for red flag incentive 
grants--$231 million. Those funds have helped States implement existing 
red flag laws. But we stood here on the Senate floor and said: We bet 
you that States are going to pass new red flag laws or stronger red 
flag laws in part because of the money they are getting from the 
Federal Government.
  That is exactly what happened. Just in the last year, Michigan, 
Colorado, and Minnesota--to name three States--have passed new red flag 
laws or strengthened existing red flag laws that will now have 
additional resources to get the job done.
  The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act doesn't do everything we need to 
do, not even close. We need to have universal background checks. We 
need to get assault weapons off the street. But we did show that 
Republicans and Democrats can step up and make meaningful changes in 
the law to protect people from gun violence.
  The Biden administration's rule implementing the change of the 
definition of a gun dealer is going to mean that millions of gun sales 
that 2 years ago were made without a background check are now done with 
a background check. That means a lot fewer dangerous people get guns in 
this country. That is good news for everybody.
  I yield the floor.
  The PRESIDING OFFICER (Ms. Hirono). The Senator from Montana.

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