License to kill: how the GOP helped John Allen Muhammad get a sniper rifle

Washington Monthly, Jan-Feb, 2003 by Brent Kendall

By 1995, however, the Brady law was beginning to show results. In its first year, it had blocked 40,000 attempts to purchase firearms by criminals, juveniles, and other prohibited persons--evidence that in fact many criminals were looking to gun stores for their firepower. Beginning the next year, the Clinton administration directed ATF to work with local law enforcement to expand the tracing of guns recovered by police, and to invest in new tracing technologies. As a result, ATF discovered that tens of thousands of crime guns actually flowed from licensed retail dealers and pawnbrokers to the streets. Moreover, most of the guns flowed primarily from a small minority of dealers--just 1.2 percent of dealers accounted for 57 percent of those crime gun tracings (ATF shuts down only about one in 40 of these per year).

Believe it or not, these were stunning discoveries, and they demonstrably proved that, despite decades of NRA propaganda, gun stores do play a major role in supplying criminals with guns.

Responding to the information, the White House won big increases in ATF's enforcement and inspector ranks. But to really deter licensed, sellers from violating federal laws--as opposed to just arresting them after guns hit the streets--ATF needed powers to encourage compliance: the ability to levy fines, suspend licenses, audit when necessary, and charge dealers with felony record-keeping violations when appropriate. The Clinton administration and a few lone voices in Congress, especially Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), pushed legislation to give ATF this new authority while also requiring background checks at gun shows.

A string of high-school shootings, which peaked with the catastrophe at Columbine High School, gave the legislation enough momentum to narrowly pass the Senate in 1999, with Vice President Al Gore providing a tie-breaking vote. The House passed a weaker version of the Senate bill, and the measure died when efforts to reconcile the two versions went nowhere. Gore's highly publicized vote, according to many political analyses, was a major factor in his loss of West Virginia's five electoral votes in the 2000 election.

In theory, the sniper shootings should have been an occasion to raise again the issue of ATF's limited enforcement powers against dealers supplying criminals with guns. But while debates have raged about whether congressionally imposed restraints on the CIA and the FBI contributed to those agencies' failures to foresee impending terrorist activity, few have asked about similar restraints that might have kept ATF from preventing the terror on the East Coast--even if it had usable information. And it's pretty obvious why. Republicans, as the architects of the current regulatory system, are directly responsible for ATF's limited powers. Democrats, still smarting from the drubbings they took in 1994 and 2000, are understandably nervous about stirring up the gun issue, even though the sniper shootings happened in the thick of an election cycle and captured nationwide attention.