David wrote: > 1. "Crime guns" are actually "traced guns." I've heard that 80-90% of > traces do not arise out of a criminal matter. ATFE encourages police to > trace any gun they receive -- lost ones, recovered stolen ones, etc. Those > happen a lot more often than apprehending an offender in possession of a > gun.
IIRC ATFE has been very clear about _not_ using traces as a proxy for anything, including which dealers have previously sold guns used in crimes (or more accurately, found at crime scenes). > 2. I wouldn't be too surprised if a few dealers account for a vastly > disproportionate amount of traces, simply because they account for a > disproportionate amount of sales. In my area, we have 3 fairly big > dealers, a few dozen small ones and probably hundreds of very small ones. > For quite some time, we had only one big dealer. A local dealer who has been shut down for paperwork violations had an interesting problem. Brady et al had tagged them as a "crime gun dealer", but failed to separate their retail and wholesale operations. Thus, guns they sold to other dealers that eventually found their way to a crime scene were seen by the public as retailed firearms. Again, tracing can obfuscate this difference. > 3. "Hundreds of violations" is typical of any dealer. I once counted the > number of written entries you or a buyer makes per gun -- I think it was > 42. If we figure irreducible human error at 1% (failing to note a box > wasn't checked, etc.), that means one error per 2.5 sales, no matter how > vigilant you are. And ATF writes them all up -- including failing to say > "yes" to being a citizen, when up above the buyer gave his place of birth > as in the US, and in some cases writing up putting down Y and N instead of > the full yes and no. Same dealer I mentioned has fought their license revocation because many of the paperwork exceptions were of the "illegible" variety. In other words, you could not tell on the form the letter 'B' or the number '8' in a recorded serial number. Guy Smith Author, Gun Facts [EMAIL PROTECTED] www.GunFacts.info _______________________________________________ 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.
