NEW YORK, Jan 20: In tracking down illegal weapons, the smoking gun may not be a gun at all.
Bullets are one thing Sacramento Police Detective Greg Halstead can count on to root out weapons that otherwise would be impossible to find. They are also largely missing from the gun control debate in Washington.
Since 2008, California’s capital has required ammunition dealers to take names and thumbprints of bullet buyers. They send the information electronically to police computers, which compare the names to an FBI criminal database.
Halstead begins his day looking at a list of buyers, picking out the ones who aren’t supposed to own ammunition – or guns. The thumbprint left by each prohibited buyer is nearly perfect evidence of crime.
‘The ammunition case is a slam-dunk solid,’ said Halstead, who regularly turns up illegal guns at homes he otherwise would have no reason to search. Some 154 felony convictions and 92 misdemeanor convictions have resulted so far.
While the gun control initiatives launched by President Barack Obama on Wednesday in response to December’s Connecticut school massacre are the most sweeping in decades, they are more focused on guns than bullets and omitted several controls on ammunition that some law enforcement officials say could help.
The United States ended nearly two decades of federal ammunition control in 1986, concluding that regulating bullets was too much effort and failed to improve safety.
Advocates say the major hurdle to effective ammunition control a quarter century ago – laborious cross-referencing of criminal databases – has been made easier by technology.
Even the former head of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, whose 1986 testimony cleared the way for Congress to end ammunition controls, is of two minds now.
Back then, ATF chief Steve Higgins wrote in a memo that was part of the testimony considered by Congress: ‘Current recordkeeping requirements for ammunition have no substantial law enforcement value.’
Speaking to Reuters 27 years later, he saw a chance that some controls on ammunition might work. ‘It might be like chicken soup – it can’t hurt and it might help,’ he said.
He added that the prime reason ammunition logs lacked any law enforcement value in 1986 was that his agents ignored them. The thinly stretched Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms had 1,829 agents and investigators to police the nation’s firearms.
‘We were just struggling to get enough people to deal with the gun part of it,’ Higgins said. ‘I don’t remember doing much in the ammunition area.’
Higgins was still skeptical about whether computers would make tracking ammunition purchases easy, but said he was open to the idea.
(AGENCIES)
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