Backfire: Mark Kelly Filmed Himself to Show 'Background Checks Are Easy'

Before going to Diamondback Police Supply to try to buy an AR-15 on March 5, Mark Kelly made a video inside his home in which he told his wife Gabby Giffords, “I’m going to the gun store and buy a gun today because I want to demonstrate to everybody who will be watching how easy it is to get a universal background check.” However, the video appears to be edited so as to leave out his request for an AR-15.

The video, filmed in a hidden-camera style, shows Kelly walking into Diamondback Police Supply on March 5. He tells a store employee he wants to buy a .45 caliber handgun. He does a background check for a Sig Sauer model 1911. Throughout the process he is recording the events via a pocket camera.

After completing the backgroud check, the video shows him back in the car talking about how quick and easy the background check was–how it only took a bit over five minutes. However, it does not mention his attempt to buy an AR-15 rifle.

He would later tell Wolf Blitzer that he went into the gun store with a plan to buy a .45 and, “if we had the opportunity, to buy an AR-15 as well.” He paid for an AR-15 on March 5 but had to wait 20 days before he could pick it up because it was a trade-in firearm.

While talking with Blitzer, Kelly took time to re-emphasize a claim he’d already made a few days before–namely, that he was not buying the AR-15 for himself, but was buying it to give away to the Tucson PD.

But as Breitbart News reported on March 26, shortly before Kelly was to return to Diamondback Police Supply to complete the background check process for his AR-15 and pick the firearm up, store owner Douglas MacKinlay halted the purchase process and sent Kelly a refund check. 

Kelly’s ongoing public insistence that he was only buying the AR-15 to give it away led MacKinlay to believe Kelly could not pass question 11a on background check form 4473. That’s the question that asks the would-be purchaser if he or she is the actual buyer of the firearm–i.e., are you actually buying this firearm for yourself or are you passing it to someone else?

Kelly’s gun control group, Americans For Responsible Solutions, has released the video with the title, “Background Checks Are Easy.” But it appears the background check for the AR-15 wasn’t that easy after all. And the system–the existing system–worked just fine.