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Where Do Killers Get Their Guns?

By Kristin A. Goss, assistant professor of public policy studies and political science and author of "Disarmed: The Missing Movement for Gun Control in America" (Princeton University Press).

Whenever a school shooting occurs, as in the Pennsylvania Amish country this week, or in Colorado and Wisconsin last month, or in Vermont and North Carolina the month before, we understandably seek answers -- to the wrong question.

The press and the public focus on motive -- what would possess a milk truck driver or drifter or teenager to kill -- when we should be asking, "Where do dangerous individuals get their guns?"

Amazingly, amid the rash of killings in our schools, Congress has been quietly working to make answering that question even more difficult.

Just last month, the House Judiciary Committee approved a bill that would bar the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (BATFE) from disclosing information from its effort to trace the hundreds of thousands of guns used in crime each year. The bill, backed by the National Rifle Association (NRA), is a political move to derail lawsuits filed by gun-control advocates against scofflaw gun dealers.

But the gag order would affect much more than the lawsuits, which are in legal limbo anyway. The bill would deprive gun-control advocates, scholars, state and local law enforcement officials, even members of Congress of vital information about the black market for guns operating in our midst.

A second NRA-backed bill, passed by the House to "modernize and reform" BATFE, would make gathering gun-trace data even more difficult. Under the bill, federally licensed gun dealers would no longer be required to keep their sales records organized according to regulatory protocol, but simply to maintain "custody." In practical terms, according to former BATFE officials who wrote Congress to oppose the bill, keeping records in disarray would make it impossible for firearms inspectors to ferret out law-breakers.

Complicated, highly technical bills about data and record keeping don’t inspire public passion or prompt marches on Washington. But the data that the government collects, and the laws that govern the data’s disposition, are vitally important to the success of citizens’ movements.

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