Current gun laws. During the peak that the bush administration, there were 11,000 prosecutions of people who are illegally attempting to purchase a firearm. At its peak in the Obama Administration, there have been 7700 such prosecutions. Your argument being that until the Obama Administration more effectively enforce current gun laws, there may be should not be any new gun laws. Im curious what your measure of success would be for the Justice Department once they reach that point. Is there a threshold you would like to see them reached before new Gun Legislation is considered . We are not saying that we are not going to be looking at new gun laws. The National Instant check system is up for reauthorization at the end of this year. This is a perfect time to look at ways we can improve on the background check system and do more to keep weapons out of the hands of criminals and people with serious mental illness. At the same time, protecting the Second Amendment rights of law abiding citizens. When the president comes to the congress for the state of the Union Address in a very emotional setting, calls for a vote and repeats that over and over again, and his administration has the poorest record in more than a decade in enforcing gun laws including the people who rely on the forms that they fill out for the instant check system. The system only works with accurate information. There is a lot of work to be done to get the states to put more information into the database, particularly about people with mental illnesses. When you have instances covered uncovered where false information is put on the form, 4500 are referred for further investigation and you only have 62 cases where out of 76,000 the government took prosecutorial action, that is an abysmal record, one the administration should focus on. We do want to look at ways to improve the law, both in terms of the instant check system, the background, and in terms of the illegal sale of firearms. That is something included in a larger statistic, brought down from 11,000 to 7000. There are laws on the books right now that prohibit the illegal sale of firearms to people who should not be buying them, people who should not be selling them. Theyre just not being enforced as well as they could be. If im hearing you correctly, you are saying that the House Judiciary Committee perhaps the broader house will consider Gun Legislation this year. Once the senate moves, or in tandem with them, or what . When we feel that we have the right information to procee. We are obviously interested in what the senate does, but we are hard at work on this issue right now, studying Information Available and recognizing that because we need to have a reauthorization of this law, by the end of this year, we have every reason to want to look at how well it is working and what ways we can improve it with regard to background checks. When you talk about the lax enforcement, the Justice Department might suggest that they need more money and manpower to more effectively investigate and prosecute these cases. Would you be willing to put up more money if they requested it . We would first like to see more efficient use of the money that is made available right now. When we have annual deficits in excess of 1 trillion there are lists of attorneys who have u. S. Attorneys who have shown shown great evidence of willingness to prosecute these types of crimes, and others who have not. The United StatesDistrict Court for the Northern District of all illinois, where chicago is located, where they have one of the highest if not the highest murder rates in the country, also has one of the lowest rates of prosecution of gun crimes. It is very disconcerting that you have this kind of inconsistency. I do not think it is all a factor of money, although we are always paying attention to whether Law Enforcement has the resources they need. They could be more effective and save more lives if this administration were dedicated to making enforcement of our existing gun laws and keeping guns out of the hands of criminals and those with serious mental illness. Illnesses than they have shown thus far. One of the biggest aspects of any gun bill that would be proposed is the socalled gun show loophole, the fact that right now folks who buy guns at gun shows do not require the same criminal background check check as they did elsewhere. Let me interrupt you. That is not correct. Any licensed gun dealer that sells a gun at a gun show is required to do a background check, just as they would if you bought it at their store or some other location. The law does not have a gun show loophole. The law has an exception for individuals who sell firearms. If they do not sell firearms that meet the tests of the government to be a licensed dealer, they do not have to do the background check. We will look at ways to improve that system, without infringing on the rights of lawabiding citizens. There is not a loophole that when you go to a gun show, you do not get a background check when you buy a gun. The overwhelming majority of guns sold at gun shows, background checks are done. For the folks for whom that is not done, that is going to be a consideration. Folks want all folks who are going to buy a gun at these shows to undergo a personal criminal background check. Last month, a poll was released that showed that 92 of virginians support closing that loophole. What do you think should be done there . We are certainly going to look to make sure that the background check system works better, what we can do better, and that will include whether the people who sell firearms, more than just an individual transaction between someone and their Family Member or their neighbor, are properly participating in the system when you have a licensing system where dealers are expected to go through this. In terms of the efficacy of having a background check for every single gun transaction that takes place, i do not think that can be done unless you have a National Firearms registration. You sell a gun to your neighbor, later it comes up whether or not a background check was done there. The only way to check to see that the transaction took place would be if you had a National Registry in the first place. I do not think there is support for a National Firearms registration program, where the government knows who owns every gun in the country. Switching over to another topic, immigration. One of the biggest sticking points here, one of the biggest hurdles you guys will have to get over is this pathway to citizenship. The president has made it clear that he believes 11 million Illegal Immigrants in this country should be able to get citizenship. The senate bi partisanship includes that in their proposal. You made very clear that youre not fully supportive of this idea. Im curious if you see a bill like this getting through your committee, given your stance on this. I think if you listen to the members of the gang of eight in the senate, theyre very careful to call it a special pathway to citizenship. Theyre not in favor of providing that, and neither am i. Between deportation and the easy granting of citizenship, there is a long spectrum of opportunities to look at to see what we can do to bring the 10, 11 million or more people in this country unlawfully out of the shadows, to have a legal status that then if they are in that legal status, may result, as it does for everybody else who wants to emigrate, with some immigrate in some opportunity, whether they marry a United States citizen, they get a job offer. There are lots of things you can do without saying youre going were going to legalize you and give you a green card, then you will be able to get citizenship. That did not result in solving this problem. It resulted in the expansion of a problem with ilLegal Immigration. Coupled with figuring out what kind of legal status we could provide to people, you have also the issue of how you assure the American Public that if we were to go down this path, we would not have a massive ilLegal Immigration. The enforcement aspects of this which are very complex, and include Border Security, everify, all of that has to go handinhand with what we decide to do with the people who are not lawfully here today. I believe, and i think most people believe that you should not give people who enter the country unlawfully a leg up over the millions of people who are on waiting lists and seeking to legally adjust their status as immigrants in United States. To be clear, in the senate and white house proposals they say the vast majority of the folks who are in the country illegally right now would have to get in the back of a line and wait for their turn to apply for a green card. There are special carve outs made for who were brought here when they were children, for people who are in the hightech fields, things like that. When looking at this question of a pathway to citizenship, there is been a lot of polling recently looking at this. Pugh Research Center had a poll saying that 72 of americans support granting a pathway to citizenship in some form. How do you respond when you see those numbers . We are certainly going to look at the work that has been done by the group in the Senate Working on this. We have a group in the house working on the issue as well. We are very hard work holding at work Holding Hearings on these issues. The most important thing for the president to do is not to try to push legislation on the congress, but rather to step back and let the congress do its work. After members of the house have the benefit of the information gathered from hearings, from the briefings we are doing most members of congress do not deal with Immigration Law on a regular basis. With regard to the republican conference, we are conducting briefing sessions for all of the members of the house and their staff on the republican side. I hope and suspect the democrats will do something similar on their side, so they can conduct listening sessions with their constituents and determine what they think would be the appropriate way to address this very, very complex issue that has many, many components. We are very much open to the idea of trying to do a broad based immigration bill. If we cannot find that Common Ground on, how do you prevent 1986 from happening again issue, and what do you do with the status of 10 or 11 people who 11 Million People who are not here lawfully today, we still have a broken immigration system that needs fixing and we ought to apply ourselves to those areas where we can find that kind of common, bipartisan ground that it will take to pass Immigration Reform. We are committed, and working very hard on trying to come wish that. Accomplish that. Congressman, i do not track immigration as closely as allen. I am more focused on the gun issue. Im intrigued by this. I hear you and republicans talk about Border Security a lot. What is your definition of a safe border . It is a border that admits as few people as possible who are not lawfully allowed to cross that border. 35 to 40 of the people who are not lawfully in United States entered lawfully on student visas, visitors visas, and then overstayed those visas. They are not a border issue. They are an issue with regards to the interior of the country, programs like everify, ones that Immigration Service was supposed to have implemented 15 or more years ago to track their whereabouts and to know whether they departed the country, is something that is also going to have to be looked at. There were a lot of promises made about how this would work in 1986, and they were not met with regard to preventing the problem from recurring. It has reoccurred three or four times the number of people who are unlawfully in the country compared to what we were dealing with back then. People who swim across the rio grande a safe border, is to you, that nobody would be able to cross that invisible line or come in through canada . Is that your definition, or something slightly less than that . Given the numbers involved, nobody would be able to say that there are people who cannot make it across the border. Is not anybody who can make it across the border. We have got to to have a system where the public believes the border is secure, not just from the standpoint of ilLegal Immigration, but all the other things that are attended to that. People who enter the country illegally are often bringing with them drugs or other things. Theyre obviously criminal issues related to this. A secure border is a broader issue. A part of that has got to be assuring the public that there is no easy access into the United States. By simply entering the country illegally. Another piece of this is the fact that your party came onto this much more enthusiastically after novembers election. Some republicans say they are very concerned about the possibility that one of your colleagues or some other republican in the country somewhere that holds Political Office at a lot of sway starts and a lot of sway starts to to talk about this issue in a way that uses words and phrases that might potentially turn off either democrats who are looking to work with you, or the nations growing hispanic population, and spoil any chance of republicans ever gaining back their support. Have you heard any of that from your leadership . Have you and your colleagues been advised to watch your words on this . Have you advised your colleagues to be wary of the terms and phrases you are using . I counsel everyone that i talk to about this issue, to remember that we are a nation of laws. It is very important that we enforce our laws, including our laws related to ilLegal Immigration. We are also a nation of immigrants. There is not an individual in United States was watching this in the United States watching this program who cannot go back a few generations or several generations and find somebody in there family who came to the United States to better their lives and the lives of their families. It is important we recognize as we work on this problem, that were dealing with individual people and a collective problem. Both of those things should characterize not only what we say about the issue, but how we legislate about the issue as well. You laid out the idea that at one extreme, you have a pathway to citizenship. On the other, a path to deportation. Mass deport ation. Whatever the reasonable middle ground is, people fear that you would be creating a permanent underclass, people who will never be able to attain those rights afforded to the rest of us. No one is talking about creating a bar to citizenship. We have 20 million or more people who enter this country every year on various types of temporary visas, and no one says, now that they are here in a temporary visa, naturally they have a right to permanent residence or ultimately citizenship. We have many people who have entered the country lawfully, and have petitioned or whose beneficiaries have petitioned, filed by Family Members or employers, that the Legal Immigration system allows. They are on long waiting lists to obtain a green card, once they are a permanent resident if they are married to a citizen after three years they can apply. If theyre not married to a us citizen, after five years they can apply. We are not talking about changing that right. If somebody is allowed to come out of the shadows, have a legal status here, to work and do the other things they would like to do other than having a permanent residency i would point out that the other proposals i have seen from some of the senators and others do not give that permanent resident status to people easily. Different ones require some of you to go back to your home country and come back again, waiving waving the current three year and 10 year bars that exist in current law that would make it impossible to do that. All of those things are on the table and subject to negotiation. It seems to me that if somebody marries a United States citizen, gets a job offer after they have this legal status, they can find a pathway of their own for permanent residence and maybe ultimately citizenship. To create a special pathway for citizenship for someone who is violating the law and in the country illegally, that would give them a different priority, a different status than people who are going through the usual processes, which seem to me to be something that would be very much closely discussed and debated as a part of this immigration process. Just to be clear, sir, it sounds like you are trying to make sure there is not the special ways to get in, jump ahead of the line. If the people who are currently in line to get their residency, if they are processed, are you then open to allowing the 11 million who are here illegally to getting in that line . I am open to working on finding a way where we can find a legal status for these people. I am thoroughly knowledgeable that we are not going to be able to write this bill on this program, or any other media outlet. [laughter] while it would be great to know ahead of time what is going to happen, the most important thing is tha