RichmondLiberty.org

Paul Brown writes:

Inspired by a story in our local weekly, I couldn't keep myself from writing a letter to the editor.

Scott Bass made at least one statement that is factually inaccurate in his article titled "Moving Target".

"Because it’s federal law that the purchaser’s name be recorded and stored in a national database, police can almost instantly identify and locate the initial buyer."

There is no national database of firearms purchasers. In a trace of a firearm the first thing that happens is the police agency contacts the manufacturer who, based on the serial number, identifies the distributor to whom it was shipped. The distributor then identifies the retailer. That retailer retained a physical copy of ATF form 4473 that records the purchaser's information at the time of sale. In that way the police agency can identify the original purchaser, but there is no national database that contains the purchaser's information.

This one is questionable:

"it’s perfectly legal for someone to buy a gun and then sell it or give it away to just about anyone, as long as the buyer didn’t purchase the gun for someone"

This statement could be true if by "just about anyone" the author means "anyone who is not a convicted felon, currently under indictment for a felony, a fugitive from justice, a drug user, subject to a restraining order, an illegal alien, has ever been adjudicated mentally defective, convicted of a charge of domestic abuse, or renounced their U.S. citizenship."

Much of the rest of the article is misleading as well.

It isn't just unregulated secondary sales that can throw off a trace. In states that require private transfers to go through a federally licensed dealer the trace would still end at the original purchaser. That individual would have to inform the tracing agent of the transfer and give him the dealer information. The agent would then need to contact the transferring dealer to get the more recent 4473. If the secondary buyer had subsequently sold the gun (remember, we're talking about an average 10-year "time-to-crime") the process would repeat.

If the gun had been stolen from the original purchaser then the trace trail would stop there. In fact, the article seems to imply that there is usually, if not always, a voluntary transfer from law-abiding owner to criminal, though perhaps without the seller knowing the buyer's status as such. Quite often guns are stolen with the express intent of either using them in crimes or selling them on the black market. Many of the ATF traces end at a police report of stolen property. Forcing private sales to be recorded would have no effect on that. Consider the fact that guns used in crimes are used by people who, by definition, are prone to ignoring laws. We already have laws against armed robbery and murder, someone willing to commit those crimes will not be stopped by a law that prevents unregulated transfer of a firearm.

The article also refers to private sellers at gun shows as dealers. If I take my car to a car show with a "for sale" sign in the window does that make me a car dealer? "Dealer" is a term usually used to describe federally-licensed firearms dealers, all of whom are required by federal law to run background checks. Claiming that used guns sold by "dealers" at gun shows are exempt from background checks is inaccurate at best.

The author touts the efficacy of the NIBIN system by pointing out that the Richmond VDFS lab scored 200 hits in 2006. According to ATF numbers, that means that the Richmond lab accounted for a little more than 5.6% of the 3,565 hits that year. In a system with 228 labs that's a pretty good record compared to their colleagues. The downside is that there were around 1,020,000 records in the NIBIN database at that time. That means that the system had a success rate of about 0.35%, not exactly stellar results.

Because the cost for the NIBIN system is widely distributed among federal, state, and local governments coming up with a grand total is virtually impossible. We do know that the ATF requests around $30 million annually specifically for NIBIN administration (on top of the existing $16 million ATF laboratory budget). By factoring in the costs to state and local governments we can easily reach over one hundred million dollars. If we conservatively assume a $100 million dollar total annual cost of the NIBIN system that means that each one of those hits cost taxpayers over $28,000. That doesn't seem like a very efficient use of tax revenue. There is also nothing to say that those 3,565 hits actually solved any crimes, only that they were able to somewhat identify that the same gun was used in more than one crime. If you read the "Success Stories" on the NIBIN website you will see that many do not report solved crimes, only linked crimes.

This article seems to be trying to make a case for requiring private sales to be transferred through a licensed dealer, otherwise erroneously known as "closing the gun-show loophole". It contains many interesting statistics and quotes to that end. Unfortunately, it falls short of the mark. Several pieces of evidence are missing. It would be important to show the numbers of guns used in crimes that have an unsuccessful trace compared to numbers of guns used in crimes that are traced to an owner that had reported it stolen. Also, it would be revealing to see the relative rates of crimes where a gun was used between Virginia and a demographically similar state that requires private sales to be recorded. Without at least those two pieces of data it would be impossible to predict whether or not requiring private sales to be recorded would have any effect at all on crime rates.