WA gun retailers frustrated with background check delays due to court system shutdown

SPOKANE, Wash. — Thousands of gun purchases across Washington state are in limbo while officials race to get the state’s court system back online.

“We’ve had a lot of people who are very angry,” said Chris Loftis, the communications director for Washington State Patrol.

The standard waiting period to purchase a firearm in Washington is 10 business days. With the court systems down, however, that process has been halted for an indeterminant amount of time.

Loftis said WSP’s verification system is linked through the courts, and their hands are ties.

“There’s no other work around, there’s no other way that we can do this to get the same sort of information,” Loftis said. “It has to go through this system. So when this system is down, the entire system is down.”

“No person that has bought a firearm as of Nov. 1 has been approved,” said Sharp Shooting Indoor Range owner Jeremy Ball.

Ball is one of the thousands growing frustrated by this lingering outage.

On average, Washington State Patrol sifts through 700 background checks per day. That means around 10,000 background checks have been stacked up in the two weeks the system has been down.

Now, customers aren’t pulling the trigger to buy a new gun.

Retailers like Ball are starting to feel the pinch and growing anxious as the holiday season approaches.

“We’re going into the holiday season and we need these systems to function the way that they’re supposed to function so we can participate in the holiday purchasing season just like every other retail company on earth,” Ball said.

There is a light at the end of the tunnel – or at least cautious optimism. The administrative office of the courts (AOC) is hopeful to have the system back online by Monday.

In the meantime, WSP is doing what it can to streamline these background checks once the system is up and running again.

“We’re optimistic that once things come back online, we’re going to be able to process things pretty quickly compared to normal times,” Loftis said.