Keeping guns from criminals

There's one type of traffic that flows too smoothly in our region - guns, en route to criminals.

Forty gun dealers, or just 1 percent of 3,400 licensed sellers in Virginia, were the sources of roughly 60 percent of the guns seized by authorities in criminal investigations in the commonwealth since 1998, according to a Washington Post investigation.

Among those 40 dealers were shops in communities throughout South Hampton Roads and the Peninsula.

One dealer, D&R Arms in Portsmouth, drew particular notice because almost 70 percent of the "crime guns" traced back to its shop since 2004 were recovered by law enforcements agencies in Virginia within a year of the sale. The "time to crime" was shorter than that of any other dealer in Virginia. Statewide, the rate was 30 percent of all guns.

Gun dealers offer a variety of explanations for the The Post's findings. They note that high-volume dealers - the top 40 accounted for 30 percent of sales during the period examined - would be likely to have a higher number of traces. Foremost, the dealers point out they can't control what happens with a gun after it is legally sold. Some are resold or stolen. Ultimately, it is the criminal, not the dealer, at fault.

There's some merit to such arguments. But The Post's research and interviews with convicted traffickers show a troubling pattern that should concern dealers, law enforcement officials and all Virginians.

In fact, one cause for concern is the way that The Post had to find the numbers and the dealers with a high proportion of traces. The paper gathered the data in a yearlong investigation using court and law enforcement records, plus information from the Virginia State Police.

More comprehensive records are kept by federal officials, but Congress closed public access to them in 1993. At the urging of gun lobbyists, lawmakers also placed severe limits on record-keeping. The rationale: An easily searchable database would be too close to a national registry of gun owners. Congress even forbids federal officials from requiring dealers to conduct physical inventories of their weapons - defying a common-sense safeguard against theft.

Equally worrisome are the ways that Congress has hamstrung the ability of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to do its job.

ATF has about 2,500 agents - the same number as it did in 1972. Of those, 600 are inspectors responsible for monitoring 115,000 firearms dealers. "By law," The Post reports, "the ATF can inspect dealers for compliance only once a year.... [O]n average, dealers are inspected only about once a decade."

Many dealers, including in Hampton Roads, voluntarily institute additional safeguards to thwart gun traffickers and straw buyers.

But, as The Post reports, there's evidence straw buyers slip through, sometimes easily. Five years ago, law enforcement broke up a ring of traffickers in New York who paid buyers with clean records to make purchases at shops in Hampton Roads. The traffickers told authorities they were in and out of some places so much they assumed they were attracting attention.

Dealers say they're wary. "It's not to our advantage to sell guns in a mercenary way," one dealer in our region told The Post. "We drive the same streets."

But Virginians - and law enforcement officers who risk their lives protecting them - deserve something more substantive. It's time for Congress to address the question of why so many guns that end up at crime scenes are traced back to a small number of shops.

The most direct response is to bolster inspections and give ATF officials the resources they need to check compliance more than once a decade. At worst, honest dealers will be inconvenienced. At best, they - and other Virginians - will have reason to feel safer driving those streets.