Now the Washington Post has published a 3,000 word article, "As Mexico drug violence runs rampant, U.S. guns tied to crime south of border", which tells the same general story, but does a very good job of laying things out in a newspaper-style fashion, connecting the broader story with the particular. It's one of two stories published this week as part of the Post's year-long investigation collected on its website as a package of stories and features, "The Hidden Life of Guns", which highlights the patterns of gun violence, the role of a small number of problem dealers, the difficulties faced by law-enforcement, and the role of the NRA in creating those difficulties.
What struck me more forcefully than ever, in light of my recent blogging about the role of oligolopies in running up our federal debt, among other things, was the degree to which our gun violence problem in America can be seen as a classic problem of oligolopy, in which a powerful, concentrated industry (the manufacturers, not the dealers) makes obscene profits, while externalizing enormous hidden costs--in this instance, the premature deaths of thousands upon thousands of people every year, and the debilitating injuries of many, many more. Below, I'll list a number of the stories in the series with some highlights from them. But I'd like to begin with the opening paragraphs of the Post's new story that caught my eye. This is the sort of work that shows that serious journalism is still being done--yes, even by the Washington Post--and that shames so much that passes as journalism today.
The Post's new story began thus:
No other state has produced more guns seized by police in the brutal Mexican drug wars than Texas. In the Lone Star State, no other city has more guns linked to Mexican crime scenes than Houston. And in the Texas oil town, no single independent dealer stands out more for selling guns traced from south of the border than Bill Carter.
Carter, 76, has operated four Carter's Country stores in the Houston metropolitan area over the past half-century. In the past two years, more than 115 guns from his stores have been seized by the police and military in Mexico.
As an unprecedented number of American guns flows to the murderous drug cartels across the border, the identities of U.S. dealers that sell guns seized at Mexican crime scenes remain confidential under a law passed by Congress in 2003.
Eight of the top 12 dealers are in Texas, three are in Arizona, and one is in California. In Texas, two of the four Houston area Carter's Country stores are on the list, along with four gun retailers in the Rio Grande Valley at the southern tip of the state. There are 3,800 gun retailers in Texas, 300 in Houston alone....
"One of the reasons that Houston is the number one source, you can go to a different gun store for a month and never hit the same gun store," said J. Dewey Webb, special agent in charge of the Houston field division of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. "You can buy [a 9mm handgun] down along the border, but if you come to Houston, you can probably buy it cheaper because there's more dealers, there's more competition."
Drug cartels have aggressively turned to the United States because Mexico severely restricts gun ownership. Following gunrunning paths that have been in place for 50 years, firearms cross the border and end up in the hands of criminals as well as ordinary citizens seeking protection.
"This is not a new phenomenon," Webb said.
What is different now, authorities say, is the number of high-powered rifles heading south - AR-15s, AK-47s, armor-piercing .50-caliber weapons - and the savagery of the violence.
Behind the scenes, federal agents in charge of stopping gun trafficking to Mexico have quietly advanced a plan to help stem the smuggling of high-powered AK-47s and AR-15s to the bloody drug war south of the border.
The controversial proposal by officials at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives calls for a measure strongly opposed by the National Rifle Association: requiring gun dealers to report multiple sales of rifles and shotguns to ATF.
The gun issue is so incendiary and fear of the NRA so great that the ATF plan languished for months at the Justice Department, according to some senior law enforcement officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity but would not provide details
The NRA got wind of the idea last month and warned its 4 million members in a "grassroots alert" that the administration might try to go around Congress to get such a plan enacted as an executive order or rule.
These two stories make a powerful pair: on the one hand, exposing patterns of preventable violence that really do involve a relative handful of people, a small sliver of violent individuals, and a tiny fraction of the gun dealers who are disproportionately large suppliers of guns for them. On the other hand, the NRA protecting them from effective law enforcement, all the while posturing as purely on the side of "law-abiding Americans."
Earlier stories in this investigative series do a great deal to flesh out this picture. The story "Realco guns tied to 2,500 crimes in D.C. and Maryland", By David S. Fallis, Sunday, October 24, 2010, highlighted one Maryland gun store that was the source of a flood of guns used in murders and other crimes--over 2,500 guns during the past 18 years, "including over 300 used in non-fatal shootings, assaults and robberies" as well as 86 guns linked to homicide cases. It began with a dramatic description of one such murder, carried out by a convicted felon, Erik Kenneth Dixon, prohibited by law from carrying a gun, but to no effect. It went on to discuss where he got the gun:
Realco has been known as a leading seller of "crime guns" seized by local police, but a year-long Post investigation reveals the magnitude of Realco's pattern and links the guns sold by the store to specific crimes. The Post compiled its own databases of more than 35,000 gun traces by mining unpublicized state databases and local police evidence logs.
The Post investigation found that a small percentage of gun stores sells most of the weapons recovered by police in crimes - re-confirming the major finding of studies that came out before federal gun-tracing data were removed from public view by an act of Congress in 2003. For the most part, these sales are legal, but an unknown number involve persons who buy for those who cannot, including convicted felons such as Dixon, in a process known as a "straw purchase." Such sales are illegal for the buyer and the store, if it knowingly allows a straw purchase. But cases are hard to prove. Law enforcement officials rarely prosecute gun stores, deterred by high bureaucratic hurdles, political pressure and laws that make convictions difficult.
The investigation also found that:
Nearly two out of three guns sold in Virginia since 1998 and recovered by local authorities came from about 1 percent of the state's dealers - 40 out of the 3,400 selling guns. Most of those 40 had received government warnings that their licenses were in jeopardy because of regulatory violations. But only four had their licenses revoked, and all are still legally selling guns after transferring their licenses, reapplying or re-licensing under new owners.
A gun store in Portsmouth, Va., transformed over the past seven years from a modest family-owned business into one of the state's top sellers of "crime guns," leading Virginia in the category of how quickly its guns moved from the sales counter to crime scenes.
The federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which investigates gun trafficking and regulates the firearms industry, is hamstrung by the law, politics and bureaucracy. The agency still has the same number of agents it had three decades ago. It can take as long as eight years between inspections of gun stores. And even when inspectors turn up evidence of missing guns, they cannot compel a dealer to take inventory.
The story also explained:
Researchers in law enforcement, academia and the media first began to examine gun tracing data for clues to potential illegal sales in the late 1990s. (The efforts so angered gun supporters that they successfully lobbied Congress to impose a blackout on the once-public data in 2003.) In 1999, The Post identified Realco as the source of 493 guns used in crimes from 1996 to 1998, based on data from the ATF. That was twice the number of any other dealer in the region, and later researchers would rank Realco in the top 10 in the nation for crime-gun traces.
Despite a welter of excuses, Realco clearly stands out like a sore thumb:
The gun industry often says that traces reflect little more than the number of guns a merchant has sold.
But Maryland dealers that have sold almost as many or more guns than Realco have had their guns seized at much lower rates, records show.
Realco is listed in the Maryland database as selling 19,000 guns since 1984. Of every 1,000 sold, analysis shows, police later recovered 131.
About five miles away from Realco, near Andrews Air Force Base, is Maryland Small Arms Range Inc. The longtime dealer has sold about 15,000 guns over the past 25 years. For every 1,000 it sold, police later recovered 41....
Atlantic Guns, a long-established dealer in Silver Spring, has sold more than 18,000 guns in the past 25 years. For every 1,000 sold, police have recovered 28.
And in Rockville, a second Atlantic Guns location has sold more than 21,000 firearms since 1984 - the most listed in state records. Out of every 1,000 guns sold, police recovered eight.
Another story, "ATF's oversight limited in face of gun lobby", By Sari Horwitz and James V. Grimaldi, Tuesday, October 26, 2010, is the source of the data for the chart near the top of this diary. It provides an illuminating look at the ATF's ongoing struggle to do its job, subject to a constant political war waged by the NRA, which essentially seeks to prevent even a basic understanding of the problem from being gained:
The National Tracing Center is the only place in the nation authorized to trace gun sales. Here, researchers with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives make phone calls and pore over handwritten records from across the country to track down gun owners. In contrast with such state-of-the-art, 21st-century crime-fighting techniques as DNA matching and digital fingerprint analysis, gun tracing is an antiquated, laborious process done mostly by hand. The government is prohibited from putting gun ownership records into an easily accessible format, such as a searchable computer database.
For decades, the National Rifle Association has lobbied successfully to block all attempts at such computerization, arguing against any national registry of firearm ownership.
"Those who wonder what motivates American gun owners should understand that perhaps only one word in the English language so boils their blood as 'registration,' and that word is 'confiscation,' " according to an NRA fact sheet.
Concerns about government regulation of gun ownership have limited the resources available to the ATF, led to strict regulatory restrictions and left the agency without leadership, according to interviews with dozens of former and current ATF officials and examination of thousands of pages of internal documents. The agency still has about the same number of agents it had nearly four decades ago: 2,500.
The firearms bureau inspects only a fraction of the nation's 60,000 retail gun dealers, taking as much as eight years between visits to stores. By law, the ATF cannot require dealers to conduct a physical inventory to determine whether any guns have been lost or stolen.
The ATF is supposed to regulate the gun industry, but many within the bureau say it is the industry that dominates the agency. Unlike the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Secret Service or the U.S. Marshals, the ATF must contend with a powerful lobby that watches its every move and fights its attempts to gain resources and regulatory power.
This year's appropriations bill for several key law enforcement agencies reveals the limits imposed by Congress on the ATF. For the FBI, there are 19 lines of congressional direction. For the DEA, there are 10. For the ATF, there are 87 lines, including the requirement to keep the gun-tracing database hidden from the public.
Until now, no one has conducted a comprehensive study of how the killers got their guns. To trace these guns, The Washington Post did a year-long investigation, including building a database of every police officer shot to death in the past decade. (More than 1,900 officers were wounded by firearms during the same period.) Through documents and interviews, The Post was able to track how the suspects obtained their weapons in 341 of the deaths.
This kind of analysis is made more difficult by a law passed by Congress in 2003 that bars federal law enforcement from releasing information that links guns used in crimes back to the original purchasers. To penetrate that secrecy, The Post interviewed more than 350 police officials, prosecutors, defense attorneys, judges, gun dealers, gun buyers, suspects and survivors. In 30 cases, the newspaper obtained confidential firearms traces generated by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. The ATF reports track guns recovered at crime scenes back to dealers and original buyers, listing a gun's model, caliber and serial number.
The Post review shows how guns got into the hands of police officers' killers and - in a nation with more than 250 million guns in circulation - how a moment of panic can have deadly consequences.
Key findings cited in the article included:
Legal purchase was the leading source of weapons used to kill police officers. In 107 slayings, the killers acquired their firearms legally. In 170 deaths, The Post could not determine how the shooters got their guns, including 29 killings in which weapons were not recovered.
Stolen guns turned up in 77 deaths. Separately, guns obtained or taken from relatives or friends who legally owned them were used in 46 killings. Fifty-one officers were killed when their department-issued firearms or another officer's gun were turned against them. In 41 instances, guns were illegally obtained on the streets through sale or barter. Sixteen times, someone bought a weapon for a person prohibited from having a gun, an unlawful transaction known as a straw purchase. The straw buyers were federally prosecuted in fewer than half of those cases. Three were illegally purchased at gun shows or from private sellers.
The two deadliest situations for police are traffic stops and domestic disputes. Ninety-one of the officers were killed while making traffic stops; 76 were responding to domestic disturbance calls. The officers killed at traffic stops were generally slain by felons wielding illegal guns; the weapons used to kill police in domestic situations were often obtained through legal purchases. Only 13 percent of the weapons in the traffic stops were legal, compared with 47 percent in the domestic calls.
More than 200 of the shooters were felons who were prohibited by federal law from possessing firearms. Many had spent time in prison for illegal handgun possession. At least 45 were on probation or parole when they killed an officer. At least four were previously convicted of murder or manslaughter, including a Texas man who had done time for two separate slayings and was on parole at the time he killed his third victim: a 40-year-old sheriff's deputy with a wife and three children.
Handguns were used to kill 365 officers; long guns - rifles and shotguns - were used to kill 140 officers. (Two were killed with a rifle and a handgun, and in four cases, The Post could not determine the type of weapon.) The ratio of handguns to long guns in The Post review - about 70 percent to 30 percent - is close to being the inverse of the ratio of all guns in the nation: 40 percent handguns to 60 percent long guns. But the ratio found by The Post matches that for U.S. homicides in general, experts say, reflecting the preference among criminals for handguns because they are generally cheaper and easier to conceal. The most common handgun used was the 9mm semiautomatic pistol, which was used to kill at least 85 of the police officers.
In short, this investigative series is a real blockbuster, providing a comprehensive view of systemic aspects of the problem of gun violence that the NRA, working on behalf of the gun industry, is doing everything possible to hide, so that no systemic action will ever be taken. The parrallels to other oligopolies are striking: create doubt, sustain denial, demonize those who know or want to know, feed the public's ignorance and fear, and keep the money rolling in.
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