'It's just insanity': ATF now needs 2 weeks to perform routine gun trace

[crickets]

4. Republicans and the NRA are responsible.

Senate Democrats sponsored a bill last year that would allow the agency to keep a gun tracing database to aid law enforcement, but it went nowhere.

Oddly, the NBC article doesn't mention the NRA.

https://www.thetrace.org/2016/08/atf-non-searchable-databases/

The 1968 Gun Control Act gave the ATF authority to regulate federally licensed gun dealers. In 1978, the ATF tried to make dealers report most sales each quarter. The National Rifle Association and other groups denounced the plan, and lobbied to kill the reporting requirement. Congress did as the gun lobby requested, blocking the quarterly report proposal and reducing the ATF’s budget by $5 million: the amount the agency had sought to update its computer capacity. [snip]

The war on searchable technology continued. In 1986, Congress enacted the Firearms Protection Act, which bans the ATF from creating a registry of guns, gun owners or gun sales.

Congress also put a rider barring the agency from “consolidation or centralization” of gun dealers’ records in every spending bill affecting the agency from 1979 through 2011, then made the prohibition permanent, under law.

First comes keyword searches, and the next thing you know, you have national gun registries.

That, at least, is the rationale for the law that prevents the ATF from creating a searchable system. Gun rights groups argue that once the government has a list of firearms, it could use that list to confiscate weapons from private citizens.

https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/02/atf-gun-laws-nra/

Former ATF Director Stephen E. Higgins and others intimately familiar with the agency’s history say the root of the problem is that ATF has no political constituency, no one invested in seeing it succeed and willing to stand up against those determined to see it fail.* The success of ATF’s critics in reining in its authority is nowhere more evident than in the bureau’s appropriation statute, which is two pages long, devotes 11 lines to describing the agency’s budget and the remaining 76 lines to proscriptions on its powers. Many of these “riders,” as they’re known, go to the agency’s most basic investigative functions. Two of the riders effectively ban consolidation and computerization of records. One limits access and use of crime gun trace data, while another undermines the credibility of whatever trace data are released. One rider overturns ATF efforts to ban the import of large-capacity shotguns, which the agency found had no “sporting purposes.” Another overturned an ATF regulation to limit the import of dangerous weapons under a law originally designed to protect collectors of “curios and relics.” [snip]

According to Cox, the most important of the ATF riders “is a prohibition on creating or maintaining a database of gun owners or guns,” which the NRA and other gun-rights advocates say could be used by a tyrannical government to confiscate firearms. The rider, which dates back to 1978, was a response to President Carter’s attempt to create a national registry of handguns. A related rider, dating to 1997, bars the government from creating an electronic database of the names of gun purchasers contained in 597 million gun sale records from 700,000 out-of-business dealers. (Those dealers are required by law to turn their records over to the ATF.) In addition, a 1986 law, the Firearm Owners’ Protection Act, explicitly forbids the government from creating a database of gun owners. [snip]

Today, gun sale records are kept at 60,000 separate locations by the nation’s 60,000 federal firearms licensees (FFLs). With a centralized database, an ATF agent in possession of a gun found at a crime scene could simply plug the gun’s serial number into a computer and identify the name of the dealer who sold the weapon, along with the name of the first purchaser. Without a database, agents must often embark on a Rube Goldberg-style odyssey, contacting the gun’s manufacturer or a gun’s importer who will direct the agent either to a middleman who sold the weapon to a dealer or to the dealer himself, who can identify the first buyer. Dealers are required to keep records of each firearm transaction. Frequently, however, the records are on paper, and dealers can’t locate particular ones quickly. At the same time, there is no law requiring consolidation of wholesale weapon transfers—those sales by the manufacturer or middleman—which means ATF inspectors have no way of knowing whether a dealer’s ledgers accurately represent all of the guns he has bought or if he is illegally selling guns off the books.

One gun database that works

Joseph Vince, a former ATF special agent and now a partner at Crime Gun Solutions, a consulting firm, says solving gun crimes is all about gathering information and having the tools to make sense out of it. He says US gun laws often make that work far more difficult. “People talk about 9/11 and not connecting the dots; but when we talk about gun laws, we’re taking the dots off the paper.” Vince says concerns that a centralized database of guns and gun owners will lead to gun confiscation have been disproved by 80 years of history with the National Firearms Act, a 1934 law that requires citizens who own machine guns, short-barrel shotguns and certain other highly dangerous weapons to register them with the federal government. Owners of NFA firearms, as they are known, are fingerprinted, photographed and subjected to an FBI background check, and the serial numbers of their guns are kept in a federal database, whose contents, Vince says, have never been divulged outside of a legitimate law enforcement inquiry. Most important, these weapons are rarely used to commit crimes. The NFA has effectively removed these guns from the criminal marketplace.

*This is not entirely true. The article discusses how Democratic presidents Carter and Obama, among others, have tried. Their efforts have been stymied by Republican congress members bought and paid for by the NRA.

Remember, every time a movie or TV program shows law enforcement tippety-tapping on a computer to perform a quick gun trace, it's a LIE.