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.

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.

The United States, home to around 4 percent of the world’s population, accounts for nearly half the civilian-owned guns in the world.

But it isn’t just the number of guns; it’s also what kind of guns and ammunition are legal and how you buy them. The shooter in Dayton, Ohio, who killed nine people in less than a minute, legally ordered his AR-15-style assault rifle online. He also bought a “double drum” magazine, allowing him to fire 100 rounds in the span of a matter of seconds without reloading. In most other developed countries, such semiautomatic assault-style weapons and ammunition magazines are banned. There are also several more hurdles to clear before buying a gun in every other developed country compared to the United States.

And yet, despite the relentless body counts piling up in movie theaters, food festivals, Walmarts, schools, synagogues, churches, offices, hospitals, bars and nightclubs, the Republican-controlled Senate refuses to even vote on a common-sense measure: requiring universal background checks before all gun purchases, without any loopholes. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) is blocking a vote on that bill, even though 92 percent of Americans support that reform, including 89 percent of Republicans.

Will that measure prevent every gun death in the United States? Clearly not. But that reform, along with others — such as reintroducing the ban on assault-style weapons, banning large-capacity magazines such as the one used in Dayton, and requiring gun safety training — would go a long way in reducing deaths. We should also consider requiring licenses from those who wish to own a firearm as well as some form of reference system (such as the character references required in Canada or some form of mental health evaluation as is used in Germany, Austria, India, Brazil, Israel and Japan). A recent international study that examined the entire body of research on gun legislation found convincing evidence that gun safety legislation reduces gun-related deaths.

America is the only rich democracy that features the routine mass slaughter of its citizens with guns. Why does this happen? The data show a really clear picture: It's the guns. Yes, it's that simple. [snip]

With guns, gun violence, and mass shootings, the United States is in a dystopian league of its own. But whenever I write about guns, I get the same bad-faith arguments shot back at me by American gun advocates who are, perhaps, unaware of just how extreme, and just how unusual America’s gun culture is relative to the rest of the rich, democratic world.

The satirical newspaper The Onion nailed this dynamic with one of its all-time great headlines.

“No Way to Prevent This,” Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens”

I’ve decided to write a comprehensive guide to understanding America’s gun extremism, engaging with all the main, spurious arguments, showing the truth with proper evidence and data. It’s my hope that this can be your go-to guide to defeating bad arguments being made about America’s gun culture—and that you can share this article with others, perhaps to help persuade them that the United States needs to fix its broken gun culture. [more]

August 31, 2021

While the Trump era exposed weaknesses in many U.S. institutions and resulted in the proliferation of reform proposals from organizations like ours, relatively little attention has been paid to much-needed reforms to the domestic deployment of the National Guard. The brutal crackdown on nonviolent demonstrators on June 1, 2020, at Lafayette Square and the attempted insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, provide important lessons about how and when the National Guard is (or is not) deployed domestically, its command structure for domestic deployment, and the Guard’s legal authority when it acts. [snip]

In response to the widespread protests following the murder of George Floyd last summer, former-President Trump deployed both the D.C. National Guard and thousands of out-of-state National Guards members into Washington, D.C. to police protestors. In doing so, the administration performed an end-run around the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the use of federal military forces inside the United States for law enforcement purposes unless doing so has been expressly authorized by Congress or the Constitution.

Aug. 7, 2020, 8:30 AM UTC
By Sen. Tom Udall and Rep. Jim McGovern

The Posse Comitatus Act bans the use of National Guard units for law enforcement only when they are federalized, meaning they are brought under the command and control of the president. When National Guard units are operating in so-called hybrid status — serving federal missions funded with federal dollars but under state governors' command and control — they are not subject to the act and therefore are able to perform law enforcement functions, like searches and arrests.

Congress has limited the activities the National Guard can perform in hybrid status, but it does allow it to perform training exercises in this formulation. Barr twisted this provision to enable the rogue deployment in Washington from 11 states.