In D.C., Mayor Hits Roadblock On Gun Efforts

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The New York Sun

WASHINGTON – Anti-gun legislation proposed by Mayor Bloomberg and Senator Schumer that would make it easier for local law enforcement to gain information on the origin of illegal guns, immediately ran into opposition from legislators yesterday.

There were few signs that Mr. Schumer will be able to repeal the so-called Tiahrt Amendment, a Republican measure which he claims prevents local police departments from obtaining Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms data on the origins of illegal guns and which has passed the House and Senate each year since 2003.

“It’s passed the House appropriations committee, the Senate, and the full Congress every year for the past several years,” Chuck Knapp, a spokesman for Rep. Todd Tiahrt, a Republican of Kansas, said. “So the Congress has pretty clearly spoken on it.”

At a Capitol Hill event attended by the mayor and the police commissioner, Raymond Kelly, yesterday, Mr. Schumer called guns “the scourge of our city,” and decried the Tiahrt Amendment. He said his legislation was so self-evidently virtuous, it was “a no-brainer.”

“In 2003, at the behest of the NRA, Congressman Todd Tiahrt from Kansas slipped a stealth amendment into the appropriations bill that forced the ATF to limit the tracing information,” Mr. Schumer said.”It was like taking one of the main tools that our police departments had … [and] tying the hands of law enforcement, all for a narrow, misguided ideological fetish.”

Mr. Schumer said the overwhelming percentage of guns used in crimes in New York City came from other states, and that it was important for agencies to share resources. “When you can put the information together, you can find out patterns – which gun shops, which gun runners – and you can stop them.”

“As a result of this amendment,” Mr. Schumer said, “ATF is prohibited from releasing information about where guns came from.”

“The ATF does not want to release information from the gun trace database because they have said it could not only hurt ongoing criminal investigations, it could jeopardize the lives of their officers and other law enforcement officials,” Mr.Knapp said. “And in fact, New York police commissioner Ray Kelly wrote to then attorney general John Ashcroft supporting the socalled Tiahrt Amendment.”

Nonetheless, Mr. Bloomberg said new legislation was critical to ensuring that illegal guns stopped making their way into the hands of criminals in New York, and that existing laws were not addressing the problem of serial abusers. “Just to put this in perspective,” Mr. Bloomberg said, “1% of the dealers sell 60% of the illegal guns that we find in our city used to commit crimes.”

“We’re not talking about the second amendment,” Mr. Bloomberg said. “We’re not talking about guns that people have a legal right to own. What we’re talking about are people that buy guns in violation of the federal laws of this country.”

Mr. Schumer claimed that the ATF was unduly restricted in its ability to search gun dealers.”The ATF is limited to one inspection [a year] of a dealer by law, and cannot go back to a dealer, even if they have a reason to be suspicious.”

A senior vice president and general counsel of the National Shooting Sports Foundation, Larry Keane, disagreed.

“[The single inspection limit] was put in place back in the ’80s because Congress believed that there were abuses of that power by ATF,” Mr. Keane said. “But again, ATF can inspect a dealer once a year and they can inspect at any time if they have reasonable cause to believe that a crime has been committed.”

Mr. Schumer’s legislation, if enacted, would remove limits to ATF gun dealer inspections.

In response to a question from The New York Sun about whether unlimited ATF inspection discretion would constitute arbitrary search, Mr. Schumer said “Well, the administration making claims about arbitrary search is a little laughable now, and it is amazing the contradiction.

“In other areas, they’re willing to stretch the Fourth Amendment as far as it can be stretched, but when it comes to guns, they are the most rigorous Constitutionalists, and sort of see the Constitution in a way that the Founding Fathers never did.”

Mr. Schumer said he hoped to intro duce the legislation as a stand-alone bill and put it up for debate on the Judiciary Committee.

“We intend to use the rules of the Senate to try and force people to vote up or down,” Mr. Schumer said. “And I am, I wouldn’t say optimistic, but I’m not pessimistic about the chances, because I think it’s so obvious.”


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