Colorado speeds up gun background checks

With the increased sales of guns, background checks have been stuck in a backlog.

But now there's a new plan in Colorado to help speed that process up.

The average request for firearms has reached about 1,100 per day in the state.

Now with the help of extra staff, the Colorado bureau of investigation is tackling the growing pile of background checks.

Its plan would keep the “Instacheck Staff” which is currently about 21 people, to conduct background checks.

16 staff members from other CBU groups would also be redirected to help the staff.

The additional help has driven the backlog down, from its average of 10,000 applications in the queue, to about 2,600.

On top of that, staff hours will be extended to 15 hours a day.

A local gun shop owner told us the wait has gone from an hour, to two weeks.

"They do their background check and a lot of them don't come back because they don't want to wait that long. for awhile, i thought they were dragging their feet just to slow it down a bit, to see what laws were going to pass and stuff like that, but now that they started picking up it's going to be great for us, and it makes me feel better because that's more gun sales out for us in a day," said gun shop owner, Daniel Lente.

Federal law calls for a three-day waiting period, beginning at the time a seller asks for a background check.

But the CBI starts its clock when the check is pulled from the queue for processing.

According to law experts, gun dealers *have* been within their legal rights to sell guns if the background checks took longer than the "three-business-day" mandate.

CBI director, Ron Sloan, says although it's a short term solution, the reshuffled staff has helped shrink a week-long backlog process to less than three days.