[url=http://www.nytimes.com/2003/05/14/politics/14GUNS.html]Justice Dept. Plans to Step Up Gun-Crime Prosecutions[/url]

May 14, 2003
Justice Dept. Plans to Step Up Gun-Crime Prosecutions
By ERIC LICHTBLAU

WASHINGTON, May 13 — Justice Department officials said today that they
planned to step up prosecutions of gun crimes as part of a new initiative,
even as a private study said prosecutors had "ignored" a vast majority of
gun crimes.
The study, to be released here on Wednesday by Americans for Gun Safety,
found that 2 percent of federal gun crimes resulted in prosecutions and
that gun traffickers were rarely prosecuted.
Justice Department officials disputed some findings in the report. They
said the department had made "dramatic increases" in prosecuting gun
crimes since Attorney General John Ashcroft made that a top priority when
he took office in 2001, with overall prosecutions increasing more than 32
percent as of the latest tally.
The report was issued as supporters of gun rights push for legislation to
protect firearms manufacturers and sellers from lawsuits and Congress is
considering whether to extend the nine-year-old ban on assault weapons.
The White House favors keeping the prohibition against the possesion and
sale of such weapons, a stance that has put him at odds with the National
Rifle Association and its allies in Congress.
Today, Representative Tom DeLay of Texas, the House majority leader, said
he saw little chance that the House would vote this year to extend the
ban. "The votes in the House are not there to reauthorize it," Mr. DeLay
said.
Law enforcement officials and gun control groups are divided on a strategy
to combat gun violence, which kills more than 10,000 people a year.
The Bush administration has focused on two problems, felons who possess
guns illegally and people who use firearms in committing crimes.
The new study, which analyzed information from the Justice Department from
2000 to 2002, found that illegal possession and use during a crime
accounted for 85 percent of the more than 25,000 federal firearms cases in
that period.
Gun control groups say by focusing so extensively on street crimes, the
department under Mr. Ashcroft and his predecessor, Janet Reno, has largely
ignored black market dealers, corrupt shop owners, "straw purchase"
distributors and others who are central to the problem of illegal guns.
The report cited 20 "rarely enforced" federal gun crimes.
"There's a huge enforcement gap in areas where the federal government has
a unique responsibility to prosecute cases," said Jim Kessler, the policy
and research director for Americans for Gun Safety who is a co-author of
the study.
It found that although people younger than 18 committed an estimated
93,000 violent crimes, federal prosecutors brought 24 cases for selling
firearms to minors.
Although an estimated 420,000 firearms were reported stolen in that
period, prosecutors filed 524 cases related to the possession, transfer or
sale of stolen firearms, the report said. An estimated 450,000 would-be
buyers were found to have lied about their histories and had their
applications rejected, but fewer than 1,600 were prosecuted for lying in
their background checks, the report added.
Justice Department officials said they had concentrated prosecutions on
felons and people who used guns in crimes because they represented the
most dangerous owners. The officials said Mr. Ashcroft had also sought to
step up prosecutions of would-be owners who lied on background checks, and
the number of prosecutions for false statements rose 8 percent last year,
officials said.
"We're seeing increases across the board in prosecutions, and we are not
neglecting any cases," said Reagan Dunn, who coordinates the antigun crime
initiative that Mr. Ashcroft began in 2001.
At a hearing today before the Senate Judiciary Committee, federal and
local law enforcement officials said they were pleased with the gun
initiative and were planning to expand on the progress of the last two
years.
The department plans to commit $900 million to the initiative over three
years and has added more than 600 prosecutors and agents to aid in the
effort, officials said.
The United States attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Paul J.
McNulty, told the panel that although it was too early to judge the
program, it had already produced "unprecedented coordination" among
officials.
But two professors who specialize in gun crime and also appeared before
the committee questioned the effectiveness of the program.
Jens Ludwig, an associate professor of public policy at Georgetown
University, said although advocates pointed to a pilot program in Virginia
as a model, that program "has not been as successful as is widely
believed." Although his comment drew a rebuke from Mr. McNulty, the
professor said his own research did not support the idea that a push to
remove illegal guns from the street had contributed greatly to a
significant drop in firearms murders in the late 1990's in the Richmond,
Va., metropolitan region.
Another witness, Alfred Blumstein, an expert on violent crime at Carnegie
Mellon University, said he believed that the Justice Department had failed
to develop a coordinated approach to gun crime.
"We are still woefully ignorant of the mix of factors contributing to gun
violence and how that mix varies across locality," Professor Blumstein
said.
Although he was not involved in the study, he said he agreed that
prosecutors had not paid enough attention to cutting off the black market.
"We're getting the low-hanging fruit," the professor said. "The other
piece of the puzzle we're not really touching on is the whole gun
distribution network."

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