The Promise and Pitfalls of Universal Background Checks

This is one of the better gun-control proposals around, even if that’s not saying much.

Much as we did after Sandy Hook, we find ourselves debating background checks in the wake of killings that would not have been prevented by one. More than 60,000 Americans died by gun homicide between 2013 and 2017, but our attention is drawn only to the rarest, most spectacular, and most unusual incidents, those where a half-day or so’s worth of fatalities happen all in one place — and in those, it is usually the...