1. The "crime guns are quickly used after sale," if I recall, comes from an ATF study where they ONLY studied guns sold within the past few years (2-3 years, I think). Grounds given as I recall was that tracing newly-sold guns was easier. Hmm... you limit the study to guns sold within last 2-3 years, and find to your surprise that most of the crime guns in the study were newly sold.
2. Difficulties of tracing -- I helped a dealer here thru an ATF revocation hearing. They'd had a fair number of failed traces. One major contributor was gun thefts in transit. Gun is traced from mfr to distributor. Distributor reports sale to dealer. ATFE contacts dealer and dealer can't trace because the gun never arrived. (The clever thieves wait for a shipment of several guns, and then remove a few, so the shipment goes thru). It was frequent enough to where I wondered why ATFE didn't set up a sting. It'd probably not be hard to figure out that there were certain shipping points where guns tended to vanish. Put an undercover guy in there, or radio locators in the gun's buttstock. The dealers and distributors would be happy to assist. _______________________________________________ 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.
