Project Safe Neighborhoods has removed more than 100 guns from the streets this year, said assistant U.S. attorney Kevin Feldis. He cited one defendant who pleaded guilty to charges related to 30 stolen guns, which were sold to people who couldn't legally possess a gun, including drug dealers and those with prior felony convictions.

"What we're trying to do is, one, remove the most violent offenders from the community who are convicted of firearms crimes, and deter others from using firearms to commit crimes," Feldis said.

Under the program, federal prosecutors work with local and state law enforcement and move violent offenders from the state justice system to the federal one, which has harsher penalties for gun offenses. The average sentence for a defendant convicted under the project is seven years, prosecutors said.

Three men were indicted by a federal grand jury this week on gun-related charges as part of the project, including Nicholas Rastopsoff, 44; Willie Jackson, 44; and Nai Ching Saelee, 24.

Rastopsoff, who has nine prior felony convictions, was arrested by Anchorage police and is accused of robbing the Holiday gas station at 1900 Muldoon Road on Nov. 21, allegedly turning a gun on the store clerk and demanding money. In a federal indictment returned this week, he is charged with being a felon in possession of a firearm. Saelee and Jackson also face federal drug and gun-related charges in other incidents.

Filing gun charges in federal court allows prosecutors to seek longer sentences in many cases.

Prosecutors have gone after felons who legally cannot have guns, people with previous domestic violence convictions that prohibit them from having firearms and fugitives from justice. They also have pursued defendants who use guns while dealing drugs.

"We've prosecuted people for theft of firearms, possession of stolen firearms, possession of silencers, possession of machine guns, possession (of firearms) in furtherance of drug trafficking ... a whole range of offenses," Feldis said.

In 2002, Alaska had the highest per capita rate of stolen guns in the nation, with 42.7 stolen guns per 1,000 households, according to the advocacy group Americans for Gun Safety. Feldis said the high numbers could be attributed in part to Alaska's isolation from other states, which makes interstate traffic in guns more difficult, and also because there is a high rate of gun ownership here.

And according to a recent FBI report, violent crime in Alaska ran well ahead of the national averages in almost all categories in 2003. Violent crime, which includes murders, non-negligent manslaughters, forcible rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults, increased from 563 incidents per 100,000 in 2002 to 593 in 2003. The national average for 2003 was 475, the report says.

But federal public defender Rich Curtner said he thinks the prosecutions under Project Safe Neighborhoods may potentially create more problems in the long run by putting young people in the federal prison system instead of rehabilitating them.

"I do know there have been a lot of young lives, people who have gone into the system, who I felt had good potential for rehabilitation and have very little hope for the future now that they're in the federal prison system," he said.