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Jan. 19, 2004, 9:04PM
Concerns about gun stores misguided
[WMSA comment: AGS -
Americans for Gun Safety ... is a disingenuous fraud]
By DOUG PIKE
Copyright 2004 Houston Chronicle
A Washington-based non-profit group called Americans for Gun Safety
claims to take the middle ground on gun ownership. I question its
neutrality.
As a hunter, target-shooter and gun owner, I've been courted in the
past by groups that claimed common-sense positions on firearms. These
champions of "responsible use" recruit membership and money
from both sides but typically lean hard to one side.
At its Web site, AGS says it is "bringing a new voice to the
debate over guns and gun safety, which for too long has been dominated
by the far left and far right. Through legislative measures and public
outreach, AGS supports the rights of law-abiding gun owners and promotes
reasonable and effective proposals for fighting gun crime and keeping
guns out of the hands of criminals and children."
Those are fine avenues to explore, but I'm unsure who is at the wheel
(calls to AGS were not returned).
A 31-page report (Selling Crime, High Crime Gun Stores Fuel
Criminals) issued recently by AGS and reported in Saturday's Chronicle
shakes an accusing finger at 120 U.S. gun dealers who sold at least 200
firearms traced to some sort of criminal activity from 1996-2000. (The
most recent statistics.)
Note that "traced to crime" doesn't necessarily mean
"traced to violent crime." If I report a gun stolen, the store
that sold me the gun years ago gets a mark next to its name. If a law
enforcement agency runs a routine check on a firearm and turns up
nothing, that check may generate a mark against the original seller.
The AGS report opens: "A small number of the nation's 80,000 gun
dealers are flooding America's streets with crime guns -- yet Washington
rarely investigates, shuts down or prosecutes most of these high-crime
dealers."
Flooding the streets with crime guns? A firearm sold in accordance
with current federal guidelines is not a "crime gun." Driving
under the influence of alcohol is illegal, but I have yet to hear the
new automobiles on a dealer's lot described as "crime cars."
Actually, several dealers on AGS' bad-guy list have been cited for
violations after random inspection by agents of the U.S. Bureau of
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. The clear majority of those citations,
however, 52 of 67 issued to the seven most-cited dealers as tracked from
January 2000-May 2003, were for record-keeping mistakes. Not for
peddling assault rifles to terrorists or dealing Saturday-night specials
to street thugs, but for clerical goofs.
Firearms sellers should be held to high administrative standards, but
linking typographical errors and back-door gun running is a stretch.
I concede that some of the dealers on AGS' list appear shady and
warrant closer, more frequent inspection, but I disagree with the
foundation's inference that each of those sellers is somehow directly
responsible for violent gun crimes. Many of the named dealers merely are
high-volume retailers caught in a statistical web that makes them
victims of their own success.
Consider that a busy gun store often sells more than 10,000 firearms
annually, and a few shops on AGS' list move twice that volume of
hardware. Multiply that by 10, 15 or 20 years in business and throw in a
system that is quick now to trace a gun's history. Even the AGS
recognizes that booming business might have landed honest dealers on its
"high crime gun store" roster, which includes a California
dealer who had 1,000-plus guns stolen during Los Angeles riots.
AGS wonders why the ATF so rarely "shuts down or prosecutes ...
high-crime dealers." Maybe that is because even the most-cited
dealer on the list had just 13 ATF violations from 2000-2003 against 483
crime-gun traces from 1996-2000. The shop that had 2,294 crime-gun
traces, second highest of all, received only one ATF citation through
the same time windows.
The anti-gun movement's efforts to blame firearms makers for gun
violence has failed in the courts. Since they could not defeat gun
manufacturers and lack the strength to tackle gun owners, the logical
targets are small companies and individuals who sell guns.
AGS claims to be the Switzerland of gun politics, but its report
waves a different flag.
Criminal use of guns is rampant, but we never will rebuild our
nation's damaged framework until we quit blaming the hammers and the
hardware stores for bad carpenters.
Doug Pike covers the outdoors for the Chronicle. His
column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays,
and he hosts Inside the Outdoors from 6-8 a.m. Saturdays on KTRH
(740 AM).
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