Regulate All Gun Dealers

Believe it or not, gun dealers are not required to keep their guns locked up, so it’s no surprise that a gun is stolen in the United States every two minutes. Between 2012 and 2015, according to the FBI, more than 1 million guns were stolen from their owners, and 22,000 were stolen from gun stores. That is nearly half a billion dollars’ worth of guns, many of which were used in violent crimes or drug smuggling or entered the arsenal of organized crime.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, usually known as ATF, is the agency that is supposed to regulate and license guns and gun dealers. The bureau is tiny and powerless because for decades the NRA has pressured lawmakers to limit its budget and hamper its operations. As a result, just 14 percent of all gun stores are subject to federal inspection, and none are required to track or report stolen inventory. ATF cannot inspect a gun dealer more than once a year. ATF is not allowed to require gun dealers to conduct an annual inventory to ensure they can account for all of their guns. ATF is so short-staffed that most gun dealers can go five years without ever undergoing inspection. And as a result, once dealers are finally inspected, more than half are found to have some kind of violation. The majority had violations like “missing firearms; failure to verify identification; failure to conduct background checks; failure to stop a sale after purchasers indicated they were prohibited from gun possession; failure to properly keep records of all acquisitions and dispositions.”

ATF also lacks the enforcement power it needs to make manufacturers or dealers improve safety. “We can suggest all day long, but ultimately, it comes down to the dealer taking responsibility for their facility and inventory,” ATF’s deputy assistant director for field operations, Andy Graham, told The Trace, a website that reports news on gun-safety efforts.

Gun dealers are frequent targets of “straw purchases” by someone trying to buy a firearm for a prohibited person. Sixty-seven percent said they had experienced at least one straw purchasing attempt in the previous year, and over half agree that current laws make it too easy for criminals to obtain firearms.¹ A majority of the gun industry has adopted security measures to help ensure that guns do not fall into the wrong hands, but ATF does not have the regulatory authority to enforce or monitor safety standards in the industry. Nine states and the District of Columbia have their own laws that push gun dealers to implement better safety practices, but that’s clearly not enough.

Stolen guns end up in crime scenes or are diverted into illegal gun trafficking networks and are almost impossible for law enforcement officials to trace, thwarting countless criminal investigations. In large American cities, those markets are important sources of firearms for career criminals. Studies show that significant percentages of those imprisoned for gun crimes were prohibited from legally purchasing guns and turned to unregulated private sellers or found weapons on the black market. Cities with strong gun laws and enforcement often have limited the supply, however. In Chicago, for instance, criminals may pay $400 for a firearm on the black market that costs only $100 from a legal dealer.²

Whenever a gun is recovered at a crime scene, staffers at ATF’s National Tracing Center face a major challenge. They are prohibited from digitizing sales records in a way that would allow for an easy digital search (the records have to remain in a non-searchable format with the gun dealer). Officials cannot type that gun’s serial number into a search engine and pull up records to learn where that gun was purchased and by whom. Instead, staff at the Tracing Center who receive gun serial numbers from law enforcement must call the firearm manufacturer and wholesaler and rely on them to go into their files and dig out that information. Sometimes the tracing center staff must paw through cardboard boxes full of paper records from gun dealers to figure out who owns the gun that law enforcement officials suspect was used in perpetrating the crime. How does this work in the future? Can you imagine a millennial searching a cardboard box to find a piece of actual physical paper?

Besides allowing digital searches, Congress must provide ATF with enough resources to conduct compliance inspections. The Compact would empower ATF to require dealers to implement security measures. It would let the bureau run targeted computer searches on all sales records and fully digitize its operations for the real world.