There are some clearly sensible gun controls that Congress should enact in an effort to reduce the level of carnage in this nation.
Foremost among them would be reinstituting and strengthening two earlier measures that Congress allowed to lapse in 2004 — a ban on the sale of assault weapons ban and a 10-round limit on gun magazines. There is no legitimate reason for letting civilians arm themselves with military-grade firepower.
But even without those reforms, this country could reduce its alarmingly high number of gun deaths if it did a much better job of enforcing the gun laws already in place.
The federal agency in charge of doing just that, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, is extremely lenient, rarely revoking gun dealers’ licenses even after multiple violations.
That’s the conclusion of an exhaustive investigation conducted by USA Today and The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom that focuses on gun violence.
Reporters in the collaboration looked at three years of ATF reports that the agency was forced to turn over to Brady, a gun-control group named for Jim Brady, a former presidential aide who was critically wounded during a 1981 attempt to assassinate his boss, Ronald Reagan. The detailed reports covered 2015 to 2017, which would have been the tail end of the Barack Obama presidency and the beginning of the Donald Trump one. In addition, the reporters had the annual summaries of ATF’s inspection efforts through 2020.
ATF, a division of the U.S. Justice Department, is supposed to police the nation’s 78,000 gun dealers as well U.S. gun manufacturers and gun importers. Although ATF’s stated goal is to inspect each gun dealer every three years, it actually conducts inspections less than half as often as that. When it does get around to inspecting, it finds violations at least a third of the time — such as sloppy or fraudulent record keeping, failure to conduct mandatory background checks, selling weapons to convicted felons, and lying to investigators.
Even though a single violation can be enough to cause a dealer to lose its license to sell guns, ATF has rarely invoked that penalty, even with multiple offenders, the reporters’ investigation showed. A Pennsylvania gun dealer, for example, had 45 violations and received eight warnings but was allowed to remain open. In Mississippi, the worst offender during the period studied had seven violations and the inspectors recommended the license be revoked. Higher-ups went with a warning instead.
Such leniency is the norm. The investigation found that ATF revoked a dealer’s license in less than 3% of the cases in which there were documented violations of the nation’s gun laws.
There are multiple reasons for this dismal performance. ATF, even with 700 investigators, claims it is understaffed. Congress is financially beholden to the gun industry and has been largely receptive to weakening the nation’s gun laws and the enforcement of them. And ATF’s leadership has been in a state of flux for years. The agency did not have a permanent director the entire time Donald Trump was in the White House.
President Biden says he wants to change that. He has nominated a former ATF agent, David Chipman, to head the Senate. Republicans in the Senate are leery of Chipman, however, because of his most recent affiliation with a gun-control group.
We don’t know enough about Chipman to say whether he is the right person to turn ATF around, but turning around it definitely does need.
The nation has seen an explosion in the past two years in gun sales and gun deaths. Having a paper tiger policing the gun dealers has probably contributed to both disturbing trends.
