The convening of the 116th Congress marks the return of the first female Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi (D-CA-8), and the possibility of improvement to background check laws for firearm purchases.

Speaker Pelosi is the first Speaker of the House to co-sponsor a piece of background check legislation. By including background check reform as one of her first initiatives on the House floor, Speaker Pelosi affirms that gun violence is a politically viable issue.

The conception of gun violence’s political viability, however, needs to be further unpacked. The background check is the starting point for most legislators and advocates—an imperative step to prevent firearms from getting into the “wrong hands,” responsible for saving many lives. But, when the public begins to lose interest, gun violence returns to the backburner and background check reform is shelved until the next mass shooting.

Since the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in December 2012, Congress has exclusively attempted to pass some sort of background check reform – expanding current law under the Manchin-Toomey bill in early 2013, preventing those on the terrorist watch-list from purchasing a firearm with Senator Chris Murphy’s bill in 2016, and, most recently, Speaker Pelosi’s and Rep. Mike Thompson’s (D-CA-1) Bipartisan Background Checks Act of 2019.

While Congress has introduced many other companion bills to address gun violence through trafficking, increased mental health support, and research on the complexities of gun violence, they have received minimal press coverage, public attention, and political traction.

These issues are not as well known. The American public, however, does know background checks. In a poll conducted by Gallup, it was found that 96 percent of those polled would support requiring background checks for all purchases. A survey by the Pew Charitable Trust found that 85 percent of those polled would support an expansion for backgrounds checks for private sales and at gun shows.

Background checks appear to be the most straightforward way to address the issue of gun violence, preventing guns from entering the wrong hands since the Louisiana slave codes of the late 1700s.

Before the country was even established, those living on U.S. soil sought to regulate who could and could not possess firearms. These distinctions came most prominently from racial classifications, i.e. enslaved African Americans and indigenous Native Americans. The firearm was seen as integral to protect U.S. property, defending from indigenous attacks and preventing possible slave insurrections.

As the country grew, focus shifted to regulate a different prohibited class – immigrants. The Sullivan Act of 1911 sought to keep firearms out of the hands of white immigrants in New York City, laying the groundwork for the National Firearms Act (NFA) of 1934. The NFA was a federal reaction to the increasing violence of the mob and mafia, comprised predominately of Italian and Irish immigrants.

There would be no gun bills passed again until October of 1968, initially introduced in 1957 as a reaction to rising fears of juvenile delinquency and weapon surpluses following World War II. It took the riots of the Long Hot Summers, the Clock Tower Shooting of 1965, and the assassinations of Medgar Evers, President John F. Kennedy, Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy (D-NY) before Congress sought reform. They re-packaged gun violence prevention as crime control, inserting it as a rider on the Omnibus Crime Bill of 1968, regulating mail-order handguns.

The National Rifle Association (NRA), the most well known and longstanding national gun rights group in the U.S., took to Capitol Hill, as they had with the NFA and the first iterations of the Gun Control Act in the early ’60s, to protest. The compromise became a regulation of the purchaser, avoiding, in theory, a regulation of the right.

The fear of race riots and assassinations by the mentally ill fueled the creation of the four prohibited categories of the Gun Control Act of 1968: anyone who had been indicted for or convicted of a crime punishable by more than a year in prison; fugitives from justice; any user of marijuana, depressants, stimulants, or narcotics; and anyone who “has been adjudicated as a mental defective or has been committed to any mental institution.” These groups, informed by the debate of the period, are what shaped background checks of the ‘60s.

These prohibitions became formally codified with a formal check system that coordinated the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s NICIC and state record sharing mechanism, the Interstate Identification Index (III), in the 1990s. This new check system, NICS, is the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act of 1994. NICS added five more prohibited categories to those seeking to purchase a firearm, protecting society from those with violent convictions and those who were not U.S. citizens from purchasing a firearm.

By regulating those already in violation of the law, i.e. regulating criminals, legislators and advocates have been able to keep guns out of the wrong hands, avoiding conversations that discuss infringement of the right. The bill, with the right Congress (all bills passed with Democratic majorities in the House and Senate), the right president (most bills passed under Democratic presidents), and the right political moment (organised crime, the violence of the ‘60s, the advocacy of the Brady’s and the LA Riots), created background checks as America’s lasting legacy to address gun violence.

But, this is a different political moment, a much more vulnerable Congress, and an atypical Republican president. The issue has also changed faces, now one discussed by students under the age of 18, no longer an issue just for the adults. The March for Our Lives Movement, to cite Emma Gonzalez, has become what the black armband of Tinker v. Des Moines’(1968) was to the Vietnam War – change.

The 116th Congress has many hurdles ahead of it, but its hopeful success with background checks ought to embolden its members to reach beyond the history of gun violence prevention that only seeks to regulate those already criminalised by law to more comprehensively address the complicated issue of gun violence.