Democrats and their increasingly unhinged Left-wing base have been screaming for “tougher background checks” following a series of school shootings and other high-profile mass murders that have occurred recently.

But ‘tougher checks’ won’t do much good if people who are legally disqualified from purchasing firearms are deleted from the FBI’s National Instant Background Check System (NICS).

And yet, that’s exactly what happened during the very anti-gun administration of Barack Obama.

As reported by Zero Hedge, citing information from the Washington Post, the Obama regime ordered 500,000 fugitives — not a misprint, that’s a half-million — who had outstanding arrest warrants purged from the NICS in late 2016, which would have been during Obama’s lame-duck, post-election day period and as President-elect Donald J. Trump was set to take office.

According to testimony from Acting FBI Deputy Director David Bowdich, the Post’s November report, which set the figure at “tens of thousands,” was accurate.

The Post noted:

The FBI purged the names from the database after the Justice Department changed its legal interpretation of “fugitive from justice” to say it pertains only to wanted people who have crossed state lines.

What that means is that those fugitives who were previously prohibited under federal law from purchasing firearms can now buy them, unless barred for other reasons.

Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. asked Bowdich specifically if more than a half-million names were purged from the database, to which he responded, “That was a decision that was made under the previous administration.”

He added: “It was the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel that reviewed the law and believed that it needed to be interpreted so that if someone was a fugitive in a state, there had to be indications that they had crossed state lines. Otherwise, they were not known to be a fugitive under the law in the way it was interpreted.”

First of all, it needs to be said that the NICS was established for the express purpose of preventing people who are legally prohibited from buying a firearm from doing so. As Zero Hedge’s Tyler Durden noted, citing federal statistics, the system has prevented 1.5 million people from buying a gun, including 180,000 fugitives from justice.

So why would anyone in the Justice Department do anything at all to make the system less effective instead of more so? After all, the Obama Office of Legal Counsel could just as easily have interpreted the law much more strictly, as it had been doing throughout Obama’s tenure, apparently. (Related: Flashback: Obama admin deliberately put firearms into the hands of drug dealers who killed more people than died in Las Vegas.)

Why the sudden shift in interpretation, as the president was on his way out the door? Durden reports there was apparently a conflict in definitions between the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the latter agency favoring the Office of Legal Counsel’s ‘crossing of state lines’ change. So OLC changed its interpretation, at the urging of the government’s primary gun enforcement agency.

That doesn’t make any sense.

Now, call me a cynic, but part of me believes this very well could have been intentional. I’ll explain.

Do you remember “Operation Fast and Furious?” That was the codename for an operation conducted by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. It involved allowing some 2,000 assault-style guns and other firearms to be ‘walked’ into Mexico, where they were delivered to members of drug cartels. The agency was supposed to track them back to the cartels, but BATF and Justice Department officials assigned to monitor the weapons lost track of most of them

Republicans investigating the operation at the time suggested that the operation was part of a larger Obama administration push for more gun control, a claim supported by documents obtained in December 2011 by CBS News investigative reporter Sharyl Attkisson. Guns connected to the operation have since been discovered at multiple crime scenes north and south of the border. One of the guns was used by a suspected cartel member to murder U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry.

Are you following me? It is not beyond the pale to believe, given Fast and Furious’ gun-control objective and the deep, deep-seated corruption throughout the Obama FBI and DoJ that this change was made as a vehicle for a renewed push for gun control.

Food for thought.

J.D. Heyes is a senior writer for NaturalNews.com and NewsTarget.com, as well as editor of The National Sentinel.

Sources include:

ZeroHedge.com

TheNationalSentinel.com

CBSNews.com