Squeezing Out The Bad Guys

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Once I was a gun guy. Or at least I tried to be. In 1992 and 1993, while researching a book on the forces that propelled guns into the hands of killers, I immersed myself in America's gun culture. I learned to shoot, haunted gun shows and went so far as to get myself a gun dealer's license just to see how easily such licenses could be obtained. The deeper I ventured into the culture, the more it seemed to me that the nation had bent over backward to ensure a brisk flow of guns to felons, wife killers and assorted other lunatics.

Things have changed mightily, although there are still inexplicable gaps in federal regulation. The law, for example, allows gun owners to sell firearms from their personal collection without subjecting the buyer to the kind of criminal background check that a licensed dealer would have to invoke if selling exactly the same gun. This loophole has turned flea markets and gun shows--and the Internet--into Quick Marts for anyone needing an untraceable handgun. Guns remain exempt from consumer-product safety regulations, although those rules apply to toy guns. And penalties for crooked dealers still fail to recognize the societal costs of illegal gun sales. Says David M. Kennedy, a Harvard expert on gun commerce: "You can get more time for selling crack on a street corner than for putting thousands of guns on the street."

Over the past few years, however, as the public backlash against guns has grown louder and louder, police, federal agents and social scientists have together waged a quiet war against gun crime that has been dramatically successful, albeit in ways that tend to be obscured by such atrocities as last week's shootings in Atlanta. It has been a subtle, deeply nuanced campaign involving tactics as simple as knocking down walls--literally--in field offices of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. Nonetheless, it has caused a tectonic change in how police around the country view gun crime. Now police routinely ask a basic question that, contrary to popular belief, they used to ask only rarely: Where did the bad guys get their guns?

Consider:

--In 1994 America had 198,848 licensed gun dealers. Most were so-called kitchen-table dealers operating out of their homes with virtually no ATF oversight. By the end of last year, the number of licensed gun dealers had fallen to 74,220.

--The sudden decline in the number of dealers contributed to an equally dramatic decline in handgun production. That's significant because street cops and criminologists have long suspected that more guns on the street lead inevitably to more shootings. Between 1993 and 1997, production of pistols, the style of gun most preferred by youthful killers, fell more than 50%, from 2.3 million a year to just over 1 million. The steepest drops occurred in California's notorious "Ring of Fire," a handful of companies that make cheap Saturday night specials.

--Last November the Brady law's "permanent" provisions kicked in, requiring dealers to run the identity of every buyer through the FBI's National Instant Check System or a comparable state system. As of July 14, the FBI's system alone had denied 50,416 attempted purchases.

--In a concerted effort to track the flow of guns, ATF and police in America's largest cities launched a campaign to trace every crime gun the police recovered, part of ATF's Youth Crime Gun Interdiction Initiative, nicknamed Yogi. The number of guns followed through the bureau's national tracing center increased more than 400%, to 197,537 last year, from 37,181 in 1990. Yogi fractured long-held myths and gave police a much clearer picture of how guns really migrate--so much clearer that at least 20 cities and counties felt empowered to file tobacco-style liability lawsuits targeting the firearms industry. Until lately, says Harvard's Kennedy, "we were blind men groping around in the dark."

Fundamental to these changes was a revolution in the way law-enforcement agencies saw the nation's gun crisis, a revolution born within ATF, the agency gun owners have always loved to hate.

In the early 1990s police typically asked ATF to trace guns only in specific cases, often homicides. Popular wisdom held that most crime guns were stolen guns and therefore untraceable. Within ATF, however, a core group of special agents began an effort to encourage police in cities with soaring homicide rates to trace guns more frequently. Despite the sporadic tracing, ATF by the early '90s had accumulated a rich database, though it had the computers and savvy to conduct only the most basic kinds of analysis. In September 1994, the bureau offered researchers at Northeastern University access to its tracing data to see how computers could be used to identify sources of crime guns nationwide. The study came up with a surprising finding: a tiny percentage of dealers--one-half of 1%--accounted for 50% of all guns traced.

In 1995 Kennedy tapped the bureau's records as part of the Boston Gun Project, an experiment to reduce the number of homicides among the city's youth. He analyzed traces of guns recovered in Boston, which a few years earlier had become one of the few cities in the nation to request ATF to trace every single gun recovered by police. "The results were just astonishing," Kennedy says. He recalls the first meeting when he presented his findings. "I don't think I had ever seen anyone's jaw really drop before," he said.