This is an echo from the past -- Senator Charles Schumer posted on his senate web site a press release in 1999 with title: "SCHUMER STUDY REVEALS FIRST EVER EVIDENCE OF MASSIVE GUN TRAFFICKING; NEARLY ALL CRIME GUNS SOLD BY HIGH CRIME RETAIL DEALERS ARE QUICKLY RE-SOLD BEFORE USE IN CRIME; 140 High Crime Retail Dealers Are Source of 1,421 Homicide Case Guns Over Past 3 Years" It is still posted at: http://schumer.senate.gov/SchumerWebsite/pressroom/press_releases/PR00104.html Schumer blamed unchecked secondary sales for the migration of legal guns to criminals.
There are several ways to respond to the implied questions about the 1% of FFLs. One is the way you suggest -- look at whether the crime use is proportionate to the overall sales. Another is to follow the implication that the 1% statistic represents criminal behavior on the part of a relatively small number of dealers. So we might ask why hasn't the ATF investigated and prosecuted these bad-penny dealers (remember we are talking about 1% of all FFLs or about 1000 people). Sting operations similar to those used to catch drug traffickers could be used over a few years to eliminate these dealers. So, why don't we hear of hundreds of prosecutions yearly from the 1%. Well actually, the ATF has investigated gun trafficking crimes and they reported in "Following the Gun: Enforcing Federal Laws Against Firearms Traffickers," June 2000, that only 8.7% of their investigations were of bad-penny dealers (see their report Table 2, page 11). By comparison, 13.9% of the investigations involve guns stolen from FFL and 46.3% involved straw-purchasing. Either the ATF is incompetent and investigating the wrong people or the 1% of FFLs aren't breaking the law. Schumer's press release suggests that private sales played an important role in the criminals getting guns but there are other reasons FFLs might not be breaking the law: o The FFLs might not be breaking the law because the buyers don't become criminal until after buying the gun such as suicide criminals who buy a gun and then criminally use it to kill themselves. o The FFLs might not be breaking the law because the gun they sell legally is stolen from a law-abiding purchaser. o The FFLs might not be breaking the law because they don't know a criminal is making the purchase using someone with a clean record (according to "Firearm Use by Offenders" NCJ 189369 nearly 40% of criminals got firearms this way in 1997 using family members or friends). o The FFLs might not be breaking the law because the buyer is using fake identity documents. We don't know what proportion of these 1% cases involve criminal FFLs. The reason we don't know is that the ATF doesn't report the results from investigating them. So, why is that? I guess more significantly, why do we let them get away with that poor reporting? It is possible the 1% is misleading because statistics about gun tracing is so problematic. Tracing guns leads to biased and misleading statistics because police agencies are interested in solving crimes and not in statistical studies, but, there are questions of competence too, see Kopel's article "Clueless: The Misuse of BATF Firearms Tracing Data," 1999 L. Rev. Mich. St. U. Det. C.L. 171. Many of the guns for which tracing is requested cannot be traced by the ATF (especially older guns). In fact, Kopel suggests around 50% of traces fail. One of the biasing factors is that these guns are typically removed from the statistic. Many guns (around 275,000 per year -- see "Guns Used in Crime," NCJ-148201, figure on page 3) are stolen. Does it matter where a gun was purchased if it was stolen? We never see an accounting for the stolen guns traced back to the 1% of FFLs. Why not? Phil Lee > The ATF's Commerce in Firearms in the United States (2000) > famously reports that "57% of crime guns traced by the BATF sold through > 1% of gun dealers." Does anyone know off-hand what fraction of all gun > sales those dealers account for? Obviously, if those 1% accounted for > 50% of all gun sales, then the 57% number wouldn't be particularly > telling; if the 1% accounted for only 1% of all gun sales (but 57% of > sales of all crime guns that the BATF traces), that might be different > -- it wouldn't, in my view, justify holding manufacturers liable for > selling to those dealers, but it may (at least) justify more > investigation of the dealers and the like. > > My apologies if the answer is in the report; the report seems to > be missing from the ATF site, and the library hasn't yet tracked it down > for me. Thanks, > > Eugene > _______________________________________________ > To post, send message to [email protected] > To subscribe, unsubscribe, change options, or get password, see http://lists.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/firearmsregprof > > Please note that messages sent to this large list cannot be viewed as private. Anyone can subscribe to the list and read messages that are posted; people can read the Web archives; and list members can (rightly or wrongly) forward the messages to others. > > -- The Art of war is simple enough. Find out where your enemy is. Get at him as soon as you can. Strike at him as hard as you can and as often as you can, and keep moving on. -- Ulysses S. Grant _______________________________________________ To post, send message to [email protected] To subscribe, unsubscribe, change options, or get password, see http://lists.ucla.edu/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/firearmsregprof Please note that messages sent to this large list cannot be viewed as private. Anyone can subscribe to the list and read messages that are posted; people can read the Web archives; and list members can (rightly or wrongly) forward the messages to others.
