The FBI is generally quite timely with their monthly reports on the National Instant Criminal Background Check System, and this month is no exception: the latest report shows 23,186 people in the “renounced citizenship” category, up by 278 from last month and 2,540 since the beginning of the year; this is roughly 91% higher than the 1,333 recorded in the same period last year. However, the real amusing news comes from the federal denials report: the number of people ever found ineligible to purchase firearms after hits in NICS identified them as renunciants decreased from the 58 reported earlier this year down to 57. My guess is that someone was misidentified and had their denial overturned on appeal.
This serves as a reminder that even the best-maintained systems are only as good as the data that goes into them. The FBI takes its mission of gun control seriously, and due to the oddities of 1960s politics that mission includes maintaining a database of renunciants. The IRS, in contrast, does far sloppier work with their own list of ex-citizens in the Federal Register. But of course, both agencies ultimately rely on CLNs forwarded by the State Department, which has never been very happy with any outsiders getting a view into statistics on loss of U.S. citizenship (as we saw from their denial of Global News‘ FOIA request). The poor coordination between the FBI and State shows up in the statistics: in some months the FBI seems to have received only a trickle of CLNs, or none at all, whereas in others the State Department sends over a huge backlog relating to some unknown period.
Recently, Shadow Raider came across a 1990 report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics which sheds some light on the early history of NICS and the role the State Department played in identifying renunciants; the relevant section starts at page 71. This goes some of the way towards answering the question of why twelve thousand renunciants were added to NICS in 2000, though it doesn’t explain other large additions like the three thousand last October.
