The latest installment in the Clinton-Gore plan to drive lawful and licensed gun dealers out of business was revealed today, with the President touting the release of the "most comprehensive overview ever of the firearms industry." But not surprisingly, this latest announcement sounds eerily reminiscent of a "study" released last year by rabidly anti-gun U.S. Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) (see FAX Alert Vol. 6, No. 50), and analyzed traces of firearms by BATF in order to allege that "1.2 percent of gun dealers account for 57 percent of the total number of crime gun traces."
However, both BATF and the Congressional Research Service (CRS) caution against using BATF trace data for statistical purposes. According to the CRS, "The [B]ATF tracing system is an operational system designed to help law enforcement agencies identify the ownership path of individual firearms. It was not designed to collect statistics.... [B]ATF does not always know if a firearm being traced has been used in a crime ... [A trace can occur] for any reason. No crime need be involved." In other words, most guns used in crime are not traced, and not all guns traced were necessarily used by criminals, so any broad conclusions drawn from tracing data are fundamentally flawed. Additionally, virtually everything Clinton proposed today is already authorized by federal law. ILA's James Baker responded to Clinton's announcement by stating, "I guess that begs the question that if authorities suspect some gun dealers of wrongdoing, why haven't they ALREADY been investigated?" The federal government licenses these individuals, and BATF is fully empowered to investigate such cases and prosecute anytime existing federal gun laws have been broken. Baker went on to say, "Now, the Administration has a plan to drive gun dealers out of business through arbitrary regulation. The Administration has a plan to drive gun makers out of business with taxpayer-funded junk lawsuits. The Administration has a plan to license law-abiding gun owners. The only group the Administration doesn't have a plan for dealing with is armed criminals, despite the fact the American people want to see national implementation of Project Exile, the one plan proven to work."
This information is provided as a service of the National Rifle Association Institute for Legislative Action, Fairfax, VA. This and other information on the Second Amendment and the NRA is available at: http://WWW.NRA.Org | |||||||||||||||
