Thousands of gun sales on hold in Washington state amid weeks-long court system outage
Thousands of gun sales are on hold across Washington state due to a court computer system outage preventing background checks from being completed. Two weeks into the outage, Second Amendment advocates are threatening to sue.
“In 10 years of operation … this is unprecedented for me at any level, state or federal,” Daniel Mitchell, who owns a gun store in Vancouver, told Fox News Digital. “We’ve never seen a shutdown that’s gone this long.”
The Washington State Administrative Office of the Courts announced on November 4 that the state’s courts network was taken offline after detecting “unauthorized activity.”
Local courts have had to adjust timelines for case filings, trials and other legal actions. And the Washington State Patrol (WSP) has not been able to complete any mandatory background checks on firearms sales since Nov. 1.
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No one in Washington has been able to legally buy or sell a gun in the last two weeks due to a court system outage that is stalling background checks. (Gabriel Bouys/AFP via Getty Images)
The agency typically processes between 400 and 1,000 background checks a day, according to WSP.
“This is frustrating for everyone, us included,” WSP spokesperson Chris Loftis told Fox News Digital in an email Friday. “Unfortunately, in this situation, there are no work-arounds or detours. Good people are working around the clock to get the system fixed, safe to use, and up and going. Patience is really our only option.”
But Mitchell and other Second Amendment advocates say that’s not good enough.
“The state has denied untold numbers of citizens their right to obtain firearms for almost two weeks,” Second Amendment Foundation (SAF) Executive Vice President Alan M. Gottlieb said in a statement. “This amounts to a mass deprivation of civil rights under color of law.”
SAF is threatening to sue if the state doesn’t get the system back up and running promptly.
Courts officials and WSP hope the system will be back online next week. Loftis told Fox News Digital the state patrol will try to process background checks quickly when that happens, but acknowledged a growing backlog could slow things down.
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A mandatory 10-day waiting period to buy a gun took effect this year in Washington, which is part of the reason gun sellers didn’t realize there was a delay in background check processing sooner. (Hannah Ray Lambert/Fox News Digital)
Mitchell argued the government would never get away with suspending people’s freedom of speech, religion or privacy rights for two weeks, he said.
“You talk about tyranny. This is the border of it,” he said. “The government just shuts down and says, ‘You’re on our time now.’ But the government works for us. We don’t work for them.”
Gun dealers didn’t realize there was a problem until several days after the outage, Mitchell said. That’s because of a state law that took effect this year, mandating a 10-day waiting period on gun sales. But now those 10 days have passed for many customers, sparking frustration.
Democratic lawmakers also passed a law requiring tougher background checks that took effect this year, Mitchell said. Previously, firearms dealers used the FBI’s federal database to process checks. Now, WSP has been given that task.
“We’re now at 15 days or potentially 15,000 background checks in the queue,” Mitchell said.
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If checks don’t start going through again soon, Mitchell said customers can expect another hurdle.
“The federal paperwork that customers fill out that’s required for all firearms purchases, those time out at 30 days,” he said. “And then you have to start the whole process over.”
State officials have released little information about the initial “unauthorized activity” that prompted the court network outage.
