By John Finnerty

CapitolWire

A divided state Supreme Court on Friday ordered a lower court to take another look at a lawsuit filed by a gun group claiming the Pennsylvania State Police takes too long to approve many background checks.

The nonpartisan political action committee Firearms Owners Against Crime and a gun dealer filed the lawsuit. The dealer claimed delays in background check approvals deprived him of sales when buyers could not complete their purchases. Federally licensed gun dealers must call the state police background check hotline before any firearm sale.

Firearms Owners Against Crime had asked the court to issue an order directing the state police to fix the background check system. The justices stopped short of issuing such an order and instead directed the Commonwealth Court to reexamine the issue.

Chief Justice Debra Todd filed a dissenting opinion arguing that the majority should have rejected the gun owners’ appeal.

“Not only is the majority perpetuating unnecessary litigation against the Commonwealth, it is enabling its expansion,” Todd wrote. “The majority’s decision guarantees that the Commonwealth will be subject to further litigation costs.”

A Commonwealth Court judge in 2022 had ordered state police to take steps to reduce the wait times for gun buyers, but that order hasn’t been in effect while the appeals in the case have played out.

The lawsuit centers on cases where background checks trigger additional review because the system flags something in a prospective gun buyer’s history. Sixty-five percent of background check approvals are processed automatically, without any involvement from state police personnel. The lawsuit focuses on the other 35% of checks.

The gun groups argued that state police had assigned insufficient staff to complete the background checks promptly.

Gun check wait times

The average wait time for prospective gun buyers rose to 82 minutes in 2021 from 15 minutes in 2019, the most recent years for which data is available.

The background check phone line is staffed from 8 a.m. to 10 p.m.

Court testimony shows that in cases where a background check is not completed by the end of the workday, the Pennsylvania State Police doesn’t count the overnight hours as part of the average wait time.

“A 35-minute wait for a background check starting at 9:30 p.m. would finish at 8:05 the next morning, and a wait time listed in PSP’s records as nine or ten hours might translate into 19 or 20 hours of elapsed time,” Justice Sallie Mundy wrote.

For a period, PSP was posting the expected wait time for background checks on its website. At one point, that wait time notice indicated checks would take 34 hours, according to a screenshot that Firearms Owners Against Crime submitted in court. However, a state police official testified that the 34-hour notice was likely a mistake because she couldn’t recall a time when it took that long for the checks to be completed.

In court, PSP officials said they had increased staffing to speed up the completion of background checks. Still, the additional staff cannot keep up with the spike in background check requests.