Squeezing Out The Bad Guys

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is study showed, first, that about a third of Boston's crime guns came from federally licensed gun dealers based in Massachusetts. He and his colleagues calculated the time that elapsed between the date a gun was acquired from a dealer and the date it was recovered by police, a measure known as "time-to-crime." Agents had told Kennedy that the faster a gun completed the journey from dealer to crime scene, the more likely it was sold by a trafficker or corrupt dealer. Kennedy's team discovered that about a quarter of the traced guns had a time-to-crime of less than two years, indicating that guns used by Boston's young killers tended to be new guns. This finding dovetailed with what project members had learned in conversations with gang members. They wanted guns, especially semiautomatic pistols, that were "literally still in the shrink wrap," Kennedy says.

When Kennedy's team members sharpened the focus to individual brands, they found that guns traced to one company--Lorcin Engineering, a member of the Ring of Fire--had a short time-to-crime in 90% of traces.

These were important discoveries. A hopelessness about gun crime had risen, based partly on the belief that most crime guns were stolen, partly on estimates that so many millions of guns were already in the hands of Americans that nothing could stanch their flow to criminals. But the discovery that crime guns were new guns and that many came from in-state dealers suggested that the migration of guns to criminals could be interrupted. And the tracing data produced a road map for how to do it.

Kennedy's computer named names. The data showed, for example, that guns bought by a single customer sometimes turned up in the hands of rival gangs, suggesting that the customer had been a "straw purchaser" who bought guns for resale to felons, kids and others forbidden by law to acquire them directly. The analysis produced the names of licensed dealers to whom an inordinate number of weapons had been traced. "Once you had all the data in one place, this stuff just fell right out," Kennedy says. "It couldn't have been more obvious."

Meanwhile, passage of the Brady law radically changed the rules governing firearms commerce. Previously, anyone purchasing a gun from a licensed dealer had only to fill out ATF Form 4473, which asked a customer a series of questions, including whether he had been convicted of a felony. If he answered yes, he could not buy the gun. If no, the dealer could sell it with a clear conscience, even if the buyer was twitching from a methamphetamine rush. No one bothered to check the answers. The approach was absurd: the nation was asking felons to confess their ineligibility just at the point of purchase. The Brady law required for the first time that someone check the truthfulness of a customer's answers. In the process, police and dealers discovered that many gun-shop customers were convicted felons--which proved that over the years, crooks had come to see licensed dealers as an easy source of guns.

Brady drew intense fire from America's Second Amendment fundamentalists. Meanwhile, in the background, a set of quieter regulations kicked in that further transformed the marketplace.

When I applied for a gun dealer's license in 1992, all I had to do was fill out a questionnaire and pay a $30 fee. Tens of thousands of Americans did likewise--until 1993, when President Clinton directed ATF to toughen the application process, noting that a driver's license was a lot harder to acquire. In December 1993 the bureau promptly issued new rules that required applicants to submit fingerprints and photographs, and Congress passed legislation boosting the three-year licensing fee to $200. In 1994 additional legislation required, for the first time, that gun dealers had to operate in compliance with municipal and state laws, including zoning ordinances. It also required would-be dealers to notify local police of their intent to open a gun store and to cooperate with ATF investigators seeking to trace firearms. Incredibly, such cooperation had been largely voluntary.

In Boston, New York and other cities throughout the nation, pairs of ATF agents and local cops set out to visit every local dealer listed in bureau files to inform them of their new obligations. The great majority of license holders turned out to be the kitchen-table variety. Most seemed to be hobbyists who merely used their licenses to buy guns at wholesale prices. But across the nation, police and ATF, prodded by the press, discovered kitchen-table dealers who had become conduits to the bad guys, in some cases selling thousands of firearms.