By ALICIA A. CALDWELL
Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) - In the fictional world of
television police dramas, a few quick clicks on a computer lead
investigators to the owner of a gun recovered at a bloody crime scene.
Before the first commercial, the TV detectives are on the trail of the
suspect.
Reality is a world away. There is no national
database of guns. Not of who owns them, how many are sold annually or
even how many exist.
Federal law bars the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco,
Firearms and Explosives from keeping track of guns. The only time the
government can track the history of a gun, including its first buyer and
seller, is after it's used in a crime. And though President Barack
Obama and numerous Democratic lawmakers have called for new limits on
what kinds of guns should be available to the public and urged stronger
background checks in gun sales, there is no effort afoot to change the
way the government keeps track - or doesn't - of where the country's
guns are.
When police want to trace a gun, it's a decidedly low-tech process.
"It's not CSI and it's not a sophisticated computer
system," said Charles J. Houser, who runs the ATF's National Tracing
Center in Martinsburg, W. Va.
When police trace a gun, the search starts by
sending all the information they have about the gun - including the
manufacturer and model - to an office worker in a low-slung brick
building just off the Appalachian Trial in rural West Virginia, about 90
miles northwest of Washington.
ATF officials first call the manufacturer, who
reveals which wholesaler the company used. That may lead to a call to a
second distributor before investigators can pinpoint the retail gun
dealer who first sold the weapon. Gun dealers are required to keep a
copy of federal forms that detail who buys what gun and a log for guns
sold. They are required to share that information with the ATF if a gun
turns up at a crime scene and authorities want it traced. Often, gun
shops fax the paperwork to the ATF.
That's where the paper trail ends.
In about 30 percent of cases, one or all of those
folks have gone out of business and ATF tracers are left to sort through
potentially thousands of out-of-business records forwarded to the ATF
and stored at the office building that more closely resembles a remote
call center than a law enforcement operation.
The records are stored as digital pictures that can
only be searched one image at a time. Two shifts of contractors spend
their days taking staples out of papers, sorting through thousands of
pages and scanning or taking pictures of the records.
"Those records come in all different shapes and
forms. We have to digitally image them, we literally take a picture of
it," Houser said. "We have had rolls of toilet paper or paper towels ...
because they (dealers) did not like the requirement to keep records."
The tracing center receives about a million
out-of-business records every month and Houser runs the center's sorting
and imaging operations from 6 a.m. to midnight, five days a week. The
images are stored on old-school microfilm reels or as digital images.
But there's no way to search the records, other than to scroll through
one picture of a page at a time.
"We are ... prohibited from amassing the records of
active dealers," Houser said. "It means that if a dealer is in business
he maintains his records."
Last year the center traced about 344,000 guns for
6,000 different law enforcement agencies. Houser has a success rate of
about 90 percent, so long as enough information is provided. And he
boasts that every successful trace provides at least one lead in a
criminal case.
"It's a factory for the production of investigative leads," Houser said of the tracing center.
A 1968 overhaul of federal gun laws required
licensed dealers to keep paper records of who buys what guns and gave
ATF the authority to track the history of a gun if was used in a crime.
But in the intervening decades, the National Rifle Association and other
gun rights groups lobbied Congress to limit the government's ability to
do much with what little information is collected, including keeping
track on computers.
"They (lawmakers) feel that the act of amassing
those records would in essence go a step toward creating an artificial
registration system," Houser said.
What the ATF can do is give trace information to
the law enforcement agency that asked for it and in some cases uses the
data to help point them in the direction of other crimes.
Houser said the "manually intensive process" can
take about five days for a routine trace. In some cases, completing the
trace can mean sifting by hand through paperwork that hasn't yet been
scanned.
In more urgent situations, including the immediate
aftermath of a mass shooting in Connecticut last year, ATF agents run a
trace within about 24 hours. Oftentimes, that involves sending agents to
the gun dealer that first sold the weapon to quickly find the paperwork
listing its original buyer.
Despite having access to millions of records about
gun purchases from dealers that have gone out of business, the ATF isn't
allowed to create a database of what guns were sold to whom and when.
ATF does keep tabs on how many guns are
manufactured and shipped out of the country every year, but only gun
makers and dealers know for sure how many are sold. There are also
strict limits on what the agency can do with the gun trace information.
And that's just the way the gun lobby and Congress want it.
Various laws and spending bills have specifically
barred the ATF from creating a national database of guns and gun owners.
And due to the efforts of lawmakers, including former Rep. Todd Tiahrt
of Kansas, ATF agents who trace the history of a gun can't share that
information with anyone but the police agency that asked for it.
As it stands now, local law enforcement doesn't
have access to regional data about gun traces. So if the police
commissioner in New York City is trying to figure out where the guns are
coming into the city from - whether they're going to New Jersey first
or upstate New York, for example - that data is not available because of
an amendment introduced by Tiahrt, said Mike Bouchard, a former ATF
assistant director for Field Operations. ATF can tell police where most
crime guns are traced from, by state. But it does not release
information on gun shops or purchasers.
If police chiefs want that, they have to reach out to individual chiefs at other departments and ask.
"It's pretty ridiculous when we have an automated system that will do it for the chiefs," Bouchard said.
Tiahrt said he first proposed limiting access to
trace data to make sure the information wasn't available under the U.S.
Freedom of Information Act. It was an issue of keeping undercover
police, informants and innocent gun buyers and sellers out of the public
eye, Tiahrt said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.
Knowing who legally buys guns won't prevent gun violence, the former Republican congressman said.
"We're chasing these wisps of smoke that won't
solve the problem," Tiahrt said. "Get to the root cause. Put out the
fire. Deal with mental illness. Deal with situational awareness."
Houser said he would prefer the tracing center's
operations to be expanded and a center built that would use some
technologies to help more easily trace a gun. But until the law changes,
his staff will continue removing staples, turning pages right-side-up
and taking digital pictures of records.
"Our job is to enforce the laws that are passed to us," Houser said. "What they give us is what we are required to work with."
___
Associated Press reporter Eileen Sullivan contributed to this report.
Copyright 2013 The
Associated Press modified.
