The big thing when I was a kid: paintball. It was the closest a fourteen-year-old could get to real combat. The only problem was acquiring CO2. The guns required compressed CO2 in order to fire, and the closest town where the tanks could be filled was a twenty-mile drive that we hounded our parents into making every weekend.
Even when my oldest friend turned sixteen, the drive was still a hassle. So we were elated when a gun store finally made its way to our town. This meant a convenient place to fill our tanks. The place we normally frequented was also a gun store and it only made sense that ours functioned in the same way.
We were wrong. My father approached the store owner one morning and asked about the potential endeavor.
“What if someone’s house gets covered in?paint-balls?one night?” the store owner said. “Who do you think they’d hold accountable? Me.”
Even as a young kid standing there in his store surrounded by guns, I wondered whether?the question ever crossed his mind regarding who would be held accountable if someone, a person, had been gunned down in our town?
I’m sure it had.
I’m sure he knew that if, for example, someone was shot and killed with a Colt 9mm SSP pistol purchased in his store, then the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) had this transaction on file, along with the gun’s serial number and the owner’s name. The store-owner, after all, had given them this information prior to destroying all record of the transaction ever having taken place in his store.
Up until 2003, this information was available to the public via the Freedom of Information Act. This database documented all the necessary information that law-enforcement agencies needed in order to solve a gun crime (i.e. what type of gun was used, who owned it, where it was procured, etc…However, the Tiahrt Amendment put an end to this database’s public availability.
The amendment — named after the Kansas representative Todd Tiahrt — restricted gun-tracing information to law enforcement only. Though it is still allowed to be used as incriminating evidence, the information from this database can no longer be used as a means for punishing information about gun dealers or manufacturers who make and distribute firearms that are used in criminal cases.?Furthermore, since the ATF’s database is no longer public, the general population has a hard time knowing which gun distributors and/or manufacturers can be attributed to gun-related crimes.
To compare this to more familiar aspects of the economy, this is not at all how the auto or food industry works. If a car or a food-product is known to be harmful, potentially dangerous, or even linked to death, the regulators (SBA, EPA or FDA) are among the first to let people know. The ATF is not held to the same standard because Congress (and more importantly the gun lobby) think comparing guns to cars is like comparing apples to oranges. And that may be. But if Glock produces weapons that are responsible for a high percentage of deaths in the country, or if a local gun store distributed most of the guns used in crimes in that county, would as many people still patronize those specific companies?
Congress’s ability to make gun distributors and manufacturers immune to civil suits has been a hot issue since before the Tiahrt Amendment was first introduced. In fact, the amendment’s stronghold has been relinquished to a certain extent, especially with regard to law enforcement’s access to files in the ATF’s database. Still, 82% of gun owners in this country believe law enforcement should have complete access to information that is required to solve gun crimes, whether or not it means repealing the Tiahrt Amendment (Greenberg, Quinlan, Rosner Research; see link below).
Logical reform of the Tiahrt Amendment would require gun distributors to take stock and report (on a regular basis) the number of stolen or missing guns from their inventory, which they are not required to do now. Furthermore, it would also stop the requirement stating that all buyer records be destroyed so long as the buyer passed a background check. This mandate truly goes against common sense since it makes it impossible to tell if distributors are tampering with records and it conceals whether someone with a clean background purchased a gun for a potential criminal.
I am a proponent of the Second Amendment; if I wasn’t, I wouldn’t be writing about it. And I don’t believe in punishing gun distributors and manufacturers based on crimes other people committed, but the convolution of gun-tracing records is both a testimony to the stranglehold the gun lobby has on congress as well as a way to ensure that firearm manufacturers and distributors (people like the store owner who refused to fill my CO2 tanks years ago) are safe, at least for now, from a weapon more dangerous than any firearm: that of public scrutiny.
