Momentum is building to reinstate a state police task force that investigates people who try to buy guns but fail background checks.

The mass shootings in Uvalde, Texas, and Buffalo, New York, and local and national calls for further gun restrictions have drawn attention to the absence of the unit.

Gov. Kate Brown has told Oregon State Police Superintendent Terri Davie to “immediately” look into ensuring the investigations are getting done.

State police also may seek additional money from the state to reinstate the unit, said Brown’s spokesperson.

The agency quietly dissolved the team in late 2020, a casualty of staffing shortages.

Retired state Senior Trooper Dan Swift worked on the unit and said doing away with it was a mistake.

“This was something Oregon was doing right,” said Swift, who worked out of the agency’s Salem field office and retired in early 2020. “It’s actually kind of a model. We can make a difference using the laws we have.”

The unit formed seven years ago by then-Gov. John Kitzhaber in the aftermath of the 2014 shooting at Reynolds High School in Portland. A 15-year-old freshman, Jared M. Padgett, shot and killed a 14-year-old student, wounded a teacher, then fatally shot himself. Padgett used an AR-15 rifle that he had taken from home.

Advisers to Kitzhaber at the time said the governor’s directive stemmed from a desire to ensure police were enforcing existing gun laws. The governor, they said, saw the move as a way to push for additional gun-related restrictions.

That meant following up when someone who shouldn’t have a gun tried to buy one.

The unit focused on the misdemeanor crimes of lying on the federal background check form and trying to buy a gun illegally.

State police assigned five troopers to field offices in Portland, Salem, Springfield, Roseburg and Bend — among the busiest regions in the state for gun sales.

When background checkers with state police denied a gun purchase over a violent misdemeanor or stalking conviction, an outstanding warrant or any one of a dozen other disqualifiers, they sent the cases to the unit.

William Rosen, managing director of state policy and government affairs for Everytown for Gun Safety, a national gun control advocacy organization, said following up on denied gun sales is important work that most states don’t bother to tackle.

Ten other states have laws or policies requiring police to follow up on denied gun sales, he said. Pennsylvania reported nearly 5,000 convictions of people who tried to buy guns illegally over a two-decade period starting in 1999.

Rosen pointed to one 2008 federally funded study showing that up to 30% of people who try to buy a gun and fail a background check are arrested within five years.

“Not in every case does it mean that someone is going to commit a crime but certainly every case warrants an investigation, a knock on the door, some questions about what is going on here,” Rosen said.

In Oregon, the troopers’ investigations typically involved a time-consuming process of poring over federal and out-of-state court records for criminal convictions that in some cases were so old they were archived, Swift said.

He would track down the person to ask if they knew they were prohibited from buying a gun — interactions he said sent a message that police took seriously any attempt to circumvent state and federal gun laws.

“Not only would he not have gotten a gun,” Swift said, “there would have been a follow up knock at the door by a state trooper.”

But state police leaders questioned the unit’s value given the agency’s chronically stretched staffing, its mandate to patrol the state’s highways and the generally low prosecution rates for the low-level crimes the troopers focused on.

A 2018 federal report spotlighted how three states, including Oregon, handle denied gun sales. Some prosecutors told the U.S. Government Accountability Office that the cases require significant effort and in turn “may offer little value to public safety compared to other cases involving gun violence.”

Prosecutors in Oregon said the crimes were typically difficult to prove since the prospective buyer may have not intentionally tried to skirt the law.

As a result, the unit found itself on the chopping block over the years and in 2020, Davie eliminated the team, returning the troopers to patrol and referring those investigations to local police.

That year, troopers referred 297 cases to local prosecutors for review. Last year, the number dropped to four.

It’s unclear the extent to which local police picked up where the state police left off.

State police track the data but required a public records request before they would release the numbers; the agency’s review of The Oregonian’s request for the information has been pending for more than a week.

A spot check of prosecutors offices shows a drop in cases referred for review.

In Clackamas County, for instance, prosecutors say the referrals related to the denied gun purchases made about 5% of the office’s misdemeanor caseload through the end of 2020. The office has received one referral so far this year.

The Lane County District Attorney’s Office saw a similar pattern. In 2020, the office saw 75 cases related to denied gun purchases. Last year, prosecutors received a total of seven.

Grants Pass Police Chief Warren Hensman said his officers review reports of gun purchase denials and follow up when warranted.

But he said he’d prefer the work be returned to the state police. He said troopers have the expertise and statewide reach and his agency is already juggling competing demands for officers’ time.

“We are struggling with homelessness, drug addiction, theft, domestic violence is through the roof,” he said.