Will Crime Gun Trace Data Be Available Again? -- Find Out Next Week

The results are in. Everybody agrees violent crime is up, and that gun crime, especially among young Americans, is a driving factor. When even Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is forced to talk about stopping gun violence, you know that things are bad.

Yet while gun crime has gone up over the past few years, our knowledge about the guns used in crime has dropped precipitously -- thanks to what's known as the "Tiarht Amendment." Next week, the U.S. House Appropriations Committee is scheduled to vote on whether to renew the amendment in the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives' (ATF) appropriations for fiscal year 2008.

Sponsored by Representative Todd Tiahrt (R-KS) and in effect in some form since fiscal year 2003, the "Tiahrt Amendment" is a spending prohibition that prohibits ATF from releasing comprehensive crime gun trace data -- even to law enforcement.

Before Representative Tiahrt's amendment, crime gun tracing data had been publicly available under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and was routinely used by city officials and law enforcement agencies to determine the sources of illegally trafficked firearms and to identify corrupt gun dealers and the types of guns most often traced to crime. In fact, this information was compiled and released by ATF in its publication the Youth Crime Gun Interdiction Initiative. In the last version of the report, released in 2002, ATF described the purpose of analyzing and disseminating the information:

"The reports provide extensive analyses of crime gun traces submitted in calendar year 2000 by law enforcement officials in selected cities throughout the country participating in ATF's Youth Crime Gun Interdiction Initiative. The analysis of a large number of individual traces from many similar jurisdictions helps identify consistent crime gun patterns that may not be apparent from information in a single trace or traces from a single jurisdiction or State. With information about patterns and trends, more violent criminals can be arrested more efficiently, more focused regulatory enforcement can be undertaken, and more gun crime and violence can be prevented." [emphasis added]

As the result of the Tiahrt amendment, here are some of the other things on a national level that used to be known, but no longer are:

• The make and model of the guns most frequently traced to crime scenes.


• The most popular calibers of weapons used by criminals.


• The number of assault weapons traced to crime scenes.


• The time-to-crime (the period from when a gun is sold to when it is used in a crime) for specific models of guns traced to crime scenes.


• The types and models of guns favored by youth for use in crime.


• nterstate patterns of illegal gun trafficking.

While this information -- and access to the data set that it's derived from -- has in the past aided law enforcement and helped in the development of policies to protect public safety, the National Rifle Association opposes its release on the stated grounds that it will be used in lawsuits against gun manufacturers (even though the NRA's high-water mark last Congress was a law that would grant manufacturers, distributors, and dealers immunity from most such lawsuits) and that it would impede ongoing law enforcement investigations, even though the Freedom of Information Act explicitly protects from disclosure any such information.

The latter claim was roundly rejected by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in 2002. In its opinion ordering release of the data that ATF sought to withhold--at that time under the Freedom of Information Act--the court stated: "ATF's hypothetical scenarios do not convince us that disclosing the requested records puts the integrity of any possible enforcement proceedings at risk ... ATF has provided us with only far-fetched hypothetical scenarios ... [A]rguments that the premature release of this data might interfere with investigations, threaten the safety of law enforcement officers, result in the intimidation of witnesses, or inform a criminal that law enforcement is on his trail are based solely on speculation."

The gun lobby and the gun industry fear information. Especially when it shines a light on how their products are used in crime.

The Tiahrt Amendment isn't about protecting police investigations, it's about protecting the gun industry.