NRA helps block firearms-data law used to solve crimes
KEVIN LAMARQUE | REUTERSWayne LaPierre, CEO of the National Rifle Association, testifies during a hearing held by the Senate Judiciary committee about guns and violence on Capitol Hill in Washington, January 30, 2013.
By Michael C. Bender, Bloomberg News
Posted Feb. 13, 2013, at 6:43 p.m.
"For two weeks, bullets pierced two dozen cars driven through Detroit’s suburbs as police puzzled over who was firing. Unlike most states, Michigan has a tool that helped lead to an arrest: a pistol registry.
Without that database of buyers and sellers, police said, the investigation would have taken longer, more people might have been injured or someone might have been killed, before they arrested an unemployed geologist on Nov. 5 in connection with the crimes.
The story of what worked in Michigan — one of six states that require registration of at least some types of firearms — is also the story of what isn’t happening elsewhere. Gun-rights advocates, led by the National Rifle Association, have successfully campaigned against firearm registries across the United States. Last year, they narrowly lost a bid to eliminate Michigan’s.
“The NRA has been extremely effective at guarding their patrons, the firearms industry, from having to provide data by consistently ginning up a fear that the federal government is going to come for your guns,” said Mark Jones, a former U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives special agent who is a senior law-enforcement adviser at the University of Chicago Crime Lab. “It slows down investigations in a profound way.”
Gun registries are just one area in which the NRA, the nation’s largest pro-gun lobby, has persuaded federal and state lawmakers to block information that might help prevent crimes, solve them or inform policy making. The Fairfax, Va.-based NRA helped persuade Congress to make it tougher to study illegal firearm trafficking, stymie scientific research on shooting deaths and create restrictions that force U.S. law enforcement to record gun sales on microfiche.
The debate over data is intensifying as President Obama seeks new gun-control laws following the Dec. 14 shooting deaths of 20 children and six adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn. The president’s plan calls for using firearms information in new ways, including a proposed law requiring background checks before gun sales and a directive to research causes and prevention of violence.
The NRA, which describes itself as “America’s foremost defender of Second Amendment rights,” opposes both changes. Andrew Arulanandam, a spokesman, didn’t return calls about the group’s efforts to block gun laws and data collection.
The group had 2011 revenue of $219 million, according to its tax returns. From 2004 to 2010, revenue from fundraising, including donations from more than 50 firearms and ammunition companies, grew twice as fast as its income from member dues, according to NRA tax returns. Still, the group says it represents more than 4 million people.
Wayne LaPierre, its chief executive, says Obama is “trying to take away” guns.
“They’ll turn this universal check on the law-abiding into a universal registry of law-abiding people, and law-abiding people don’t want that,” LaPierre said Feb. 2 on “Fox News Sunday.”
Todd Tiahrt, a former Republican congressman from Kansas, said police have the tools to track criminals. Tiahrt successfully pushed NRA-backed measures to block access to data tracing the sale and possession of guns used in crimes, and ban the information from being used as evidence in civil court.
His amendments stopped the ATF from requiring that gun dealers check their inventory for missing weapons and mandated the Federal Bureau of Investigation destroy background check results within 24 hours.
Tiahrt, now chief executive of Neumann Systems, a Colorado Springs, Colo.-based emissions-control provider, said authorities’ best response to the Connecticut massacre would be to investigate the mental-health history of shooter Adam Lanza.
“If they were really concerned about what happened in Newtown, they’d find out what psychiatric drugs this kid was on, how that impacted his view of violence,” he said. “Their motives are questionable at best.”
Since 1979, Congress has prevented ATF from keeping centralized gun-ownership records, according to the agency. Sales data instead are maintained by the country’s 58,900 federally licensed firearms dealers. When they go out of business, they’re required to send the paperwork to ATF, which stores it on microfilm and microfiche.
Without a computer database, ATF traces a gun by contacting the manufacturer to identify the distributor, who will know the dealer. One of those three sources typically will be out of business, forcing ATF to sift through 445 million snapshot images of sales records, said Ginger Colbrun, a spokeswoman.
In 1999, the agency released the results of such traces, showing that Badger Guns & Ammo in West Milwaukee, Wis., sold more firearms used in crimes than any other U.S. dealer. The store promised to change its sales practices.
After the announcement, the number of its guns linked to crimes decreased, according to Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research in Baltimore. Once the Tiahrt measures took effect in 2003 and the data couldn’t be released publicly, Badger guns linked to crimes increased, according to Webster’s study, published last year in the Journal of Urban Health.
“What the Tiahrt amendments do is provide cover for irresponsible — if not outlaw — dealers,” Webster said.
Milton Beatovic, who said he was an owner of Badger until 2007, declined to comment.
Richard Gardiner, a Fairfax-based lawyer who specializes in firearms cases, said shielding trace data and banning inventory requirements help protect dealers from being harassed by police and reporters.
“That’s how ATF uses most of its regulations,” Gardiner said. “They go after dealers.”
Starting in 1996, the NRA also successfully backed a freeze on U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention funding for research that might have suggested ways to prevent gun killings, said Mark Rosenberg, former head of the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control. There were 31,700 gun deaths in 2011, the most recent data available.
The freeze followed the New England Journal of Medicine’s publication of a CDC-funded study that showed guns kept in the home increased the risk of homicide."
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via Social Anxiety Forum http://www.socialanxietysupport.com/forum/f32/nra-helps-block-firearms-data-law-used-to-solve-crimes-257474/
National Rifle Association President David Keene (left) talks with NRA executive Wayne LaPierre last week before the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on gun violence. (Susan Walsh/AP)
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