Tracking Weapons To Solve Crimes Atf Analyst Teaches Law Enforcement How To Use Gun Tracing In Investigations

Tracing ownership of guns is becoming increasingly important in crime solving, a federal firearms expert said Tuesday in Spokane.

When police find a gun used in a crime, they call upon the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to track its ownership history.

The ATF can trace the ownership from the manufacturer or importer through retail gun dealers. There is no record of gun sales between private individuals.

Increasingly, the ATF says guns are ending up in the hands of kids.

The number of ATF gun traces has increased almost 20-fold in the past decade, from 10,586 in 1989 to 208,000 last year.

Four out of 10 guns used in crimes were used by juveniles, statistics show. They also reveal that the number of murders by juveniles has quadrupled since the mid-1980s.

In 1996, President Clinton was behind the Youth Crime Gun Interdiction Initiative, which resulted in a large increase in the number of gun traces.

“The gun trace will take you to someone,” said Richard Young, a program analyst at the ATF’s National Tracing Center in Falls Waters, W.Va.

“Putting the gun in someone’s hands often goes a long ways in solving the crime,” he said.

“There is no national registry,” he said, stopping short of saying what such a data base would mean for crime-solving.

The National Rifle Association and other gun-lobby groups oppose gun registration.

“I believe the NRA supports tracing,” Young said.

He was in Spokane for an ATF-sponsored gun-tracing workshop for 50 representatives from more than a dozen police agencies in Eastern Washington.

Such gun tracing was used in last summer’s fatal shooting of a Washington State Patrol trooper in the Tri-Cities.

Gun tracing also was used to prove white supremacist Chevie Kehoe, formerly of Spokane, was in possession of firearms stolen from a murdered Arkansas gun dealer.

Guns sold by Chevie Kehoe and his father, Kirby Kehoe, turned up at a Seattle gun show and when a Spokane skinhead was arrested in South Dakota.

Since 1968, manufacturers or importers have been required to put serial numbers on all firearms and record the names of registered gun dealers who buy the weapons.

In southern Idaho, gun tracing was used to identify a man and a woman who supplied a handgun to a juvenile gang member who fatally shot a New Plymouth police officer in 1993.

Currently, 37 cities in the United States, including Seattle and Portland, have gun-tracing programs that allow direct computer links between the police agencies and the ATF tracing center.

Smaller cities, such as Spokane, submit their gun-trace requests to the ATF by fax machine and usually receive the ownership history within 10 days.

Manufacturers and retail dealers have up to 24 hours each to respond to ATF inquiries about gun sales, protracting the process.

“With technology, we’re trying to shorten the time,” Young said.

In major cases, such as the Columbine High School shooting last year in Colorado, gun traces are given urgent priority, and the results are obtained in 24 hours.

Spokane police agencies submitted 400 gun trace requests in the past six months, ATF supervisor Brad Farnsworth said.

Tracing also can show whether guns are coming from a particular gun dealer or trafficker, Young said.

The ATF gun tracing center has the serial numbers of 1 million firearms used in crimes in its data base. Many of those weapons are destroyed.

Graphic: Federal gun traces rose rapidly in ‘90s