4473 Mistake

[Smudge]

A friend of mine who isn’t an internet user went to buy a new pistol and put the wrong city for his place of birth, he entered Temple instead of Fort Hood and has been delayed for a week now, is there anything he needs to do or does he need to be worried about being in any kind of trouble?

[carlson1]

No. People make mistakes a lot on the 4473. As many times I have filled them out I made mistake last week on my address. The FFL caught it first though. I think intent means a lot. You intended to make a straw purchase, you intended to lie about being under a restraining, you intending to lie about being addicted, etc…. I think that is when you have a problem.

[PriestTheRunner]

They hardly enforce ANY actual 4473 lies, so I highly doubt there would be actual legal trouble.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... ata-shows/

[PriestTheRunner]

They hardly enforce ANY actual 4473 lies, so I highly doubt there would be actual legal trouble.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... ata-shows/

(Non-paywalled):

“Lying on an ATF form 4473 is a federal violation and can lead to severe penalties and jail time. Don’t lie and buy.”

— Tweet from the Houston office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF), Sept. 8, 2021

Form 4473 — the Firearm Transaction Record — is a six-page document that must be filled out whenever someone buys a firearm from a licensed firearm dealer.

The form asks questions including whether the person buying the gun is a felon, whether the person is a fugitive from justice or convicted of domestic abuse, whether the person is addicted to drugs and whether the person is the actual buyer of the firearm.

This tweet by ATF’s Houston office led a swarm of Twitter users to ask why the bureau didn’t charge Hunter Biden, the president’s son, for allegedly lying on Form 4473 when he purchased a handgun in October 2018. The controversy prompted us to request statistics from the Justice Department to determine whether someone falsely filling out the form faced much of a risk of prosecution.

It took months to obtain the data. The answer, it turns out, is no.

The statistics are newly relevant as Congress discusses how to strengthen gun laws in the wake of high-profile mass shootings. This is a prime illustration of how, for a variety of reasons including prosecutorial choices, existing laws are not always rigorously or consistently enforced.

The Facts
Starting with the National Firearms Act of 1938, Congress has sought to limit gun purchases by certain individuals such as fugitives and people convicted of a felony. After high-profile assassinations and the occupation of the California Capitol by armed Black Panthers, President Lyndon B. Johnson urged passage of the Gun Control Act of 1968, which among other things expanded the list of prohibited people to include someone who is “an unlawful user of or addicted to marijuana or any depressant or stimulant drug.”

The reason for adding drug users to the list is a bit obscure, according to experts we consulted. Johnson did not mention the issue in his speech calling for a new gun-control law or in his remarks when signing the bill. But the mid-1960s witnessed the rise of counterculture, with its abundant drug use, while marijuana at the time was often believed by law enforcement to be the drug of choice for people of color.

The Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act of 1993, ushered into law by then-Sen. Joe Biden, at the time chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, made Form 4473 a key part of background checks for gun purchases mandated by the law.

Lying on the form is a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison. For being a user of unlawful drugs in possession of a firearm, the punishment is up to five years.

But according to newly revealed Justice Department records, the odds of being charged for lying on this form are virtually nonexistent. In the 2019 fiscal year, when Hunter Biden purchased his gun, federal prosecutors received 478 referrals for lying on Form 4473 — and filed just 298 cases, according to data extracted from the U.S. attorneys’ case management system. That’s out of approximately 27 million background checks undertaken in a 12-month period.

The numbers were roughly similar for fiscal 2018 (444 referrals and 271 cases) and fiscal 2020 (433 referrals and 243 cases). The data does not indicate the success rate of the prosecutions.

At issue is when Biden answered “no” on the sixth question on the form when purchasing a gun Oct. 12, 2018: “Are you an unlawful user of, or addicted to, marijuana or any depressant, stimulant, narcotic drug, or any other controlled substance?”

According to the U.S. code, “the term ‘addict’ means any individual who habitually uses any narcotic drug so as to endanger the public morals, health, safety, or welfare, or who is so far addicted to the use of narcotic drugs as to have lost the power of self-control with reference to his addiction.”

In a guidance document for the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS), ATF has emphasized drug use within the past year could trigger the prohibition on Form 4473. “An inference of current use or possession may be drawn from evidence of a recent use or possession of a controlled substance or a pattern of use or possession that reasonably covers the present time,” the document said. “The ATF has determined that the present time is represented by the time frame of within the past 12 months.”

Biden had been discharged five years earlier from the Navy Reserve for drug use. According to a memoir published in 2021, he was actively using crack cocaine in the year he bought the gun.

In the spring of 2018, “I drove my rental to the Chateau Marmont, in West Hollywood, where I checked into a bungalow and by 4 a.m. had smoked every crumb of crack I’d brought,” Biden wrote in “Beautiful Things.” In the fall of that year, he returned east in an effort to clean up but failed so badly, he writes, that his parents staged an intervention and insisted he go to a rehab center.

Biden said he only walked into the lobby of the center and immediately called an Uber to take him to a hotel for two days. While everyone “thought I was safe and sound at the center, I sat in my room and smoked the crack I’d tucked away in my traveling bag,” he said.

About two weeks after the purchase of the gun, Biden’s then-girlfriend, Hallie, his brother’s widow, threw the .38 revolver into a trash can behind a grocery store across the street from a high school. “I think she believes I was gonna kill myself,” Biden told police, according to the police report obtained by Politico. The gun went missing but was later recovered and no charges were filed.

An attorney for Hunter Biden did not respond to a request for comment.

The data released by the Justice Department does not show how many people might have been prosecuted for falsely answering the question about active drug use. But a review of such cases in Delaware, also provided to The Fact Checker, shows that in fiscal 2019, only three Form 4473 cases were referred for prosecution in the state — and the U.S. attorney opted not to bring them.

Many of the prosecutions concerned obvious instances of “straw buyers,” such as a woman purchasing a gun while on the phone with a friend receiving instructions about what type of gun to buy. Straw buyers are often acting on behalf of people who would not pass a background check, such as a felon. Keeping guns out of the hands of people who already have committed heinous crimes is probably a higher priority than a drug abuser.

The names in the referrals were redacted for privacy reasons, but a Justice Department official said none of the referrals mentioned Hunter Biden.

A 1990 Justice Department feasibility study noted how difficult it was to bring cases against people who falsely answer questions on Form 4473. Unlike the rich paper trail that exists for felons, no such record exists for drug abusers, the study said, noting that it is against the law to disclose “the medical records of persons who have been engaged in a drug rehabilitation program funded by the federal government.”

Erik Longnecker, an ATF spokesman, said only that “the tweet is accurate.” He referred questions about the pace of prosecutions to the Justice Department.

In a statement to The Fact Checker, another Justice Department official indicated that the Form 4473 cases were determined not to have enough evidence for a successful prosecution.

“Declinations of matters referred to a U.S. attorney’s office can occur for a variety of reasons,” the statement said. “Initial declinations typically occur when the prosecutor makes an immediate determination that a matter is not sufficient or suitable for prosecution. The large majority of ‘later declinations’ — declinations where a USAO has delved into the facts and circumstances of the matter — show that suspects investigated [under false-statement statues] were declined for federal prosecution due to a lack of sufficient evidence in the matter referred.”

[Smudge]

Thanks for your replies.

[NotRPB]

Thanks for your replies.

IANAL I'm Not A Lawyer
but
When asked questions like DATE or place of birth
like when picking up Prescriptions & pharmacy asks date of birth
I say my DISCLAIMER
"I have no personal knowledge of that, I only know what I was told, because I do not recall nor remember that day, I can't even swear that I was there that day, I have no recollection of ever being there that day, or which date it was ...though I'm told that I was. So, based on hearsay evidence.. I was told it was ...."

Pharmacist usually replies that I was probably there that day ... probably

[surprise_i'm_armed]

To avoid any legal problems when lying on the 4473, just state your name as "Hunter Biden".

All will be overlooked. :-)

SIA

[C-dub]

If there is no denial within 3 days I thought they could proceed with the transfer.