Baltimore sues ATF over access to gun data

The city of Baltimore is suing the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives for blocking access to data on guns used to commit crimes — information it says is essential to tackling gun violence and identifying sellers who flooding the city with weapons.

In a lawsuit filed Monday, the city’s lawyers argued that the ATF adopted an overly narrow interpretation of legislation enacted by Republicans in Congress in 2003 at the urging of the National Rifle Association. The law blocked public access to gun trace data collected by the federal government on weapons recovered from the nation’s crime scenes.

The so-called Tiahrt Amendment, named for its sponsor, former Rep. Todd Tiahrt, Republican of Kansas, prevents the use of federal funding to release information about traces recorded in the federal firearms tracking database — tantamount to a disclosure blackout.

An ATF spokeswoman did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The agency’s lawyers are skeptical that legal challenges to the Tiahrt amendment will succeed in the appeals court, according to officials with knowledge of the situation.

Local police forces have access to tracking information, but are often reluctant to share it with local governments. The ATF — despite President Biden’s pledge to improve access to firearms data — has flatly refused to make public information that could identify manufacturers, gun sellers and federally licensed dealers most likely to sell to criminals or straw buyers.

“We actually need all the data,” said Mayor Brandon M. Scott, who added that the information was particularly crucial for identifying gun dealers outside the city, in neighboring Baltimore County and elsewhere, whose guns often end up being used to commit crimes to commit. Baltimore.

“By limiting our ability to deploy effective public safety strategies, the Tiahrt Amendment, put forward by NRA-backed politicians and Congress, endangers the lives of residents not only here in Baltimore City, but across the entire United States of America,” Mr. Scott said. reporters announced the lawsuit on Tuesday.

In the filing, the city cited three crimes that required access to tracking data: the murder of Izaiah Carter, 16, who was shot near his school in East Baltimore in March; the death of Maya Morton, 23, who was caught in the crossfire of a shooting in January while driving with her two young children; and a shootout at Carver Vocational-Technical High School in October that seriously injured two teenagers.

In 2020, President Biden campaigned on a promise to repeal the Tiahrt Amendment. But those efforts failed, and an attempt to repeal the bipartisan gun law passed in 2022 was unsuccessful.

Gun rights groups and gun manufacturers have lobbied intensely to block legislative efforts to roll back the amendment, arguing that the effort is a political stunt to “name and shame” law-abiding federally licensed dealers whose guns inevitably end up in the wrong hands ‘.

But the trace data, in the rare cases that have been made public, has illuminated the avenues through which legally manufactured and legally sold firearms are acquired by criminals.

From 2014 to 2020, six small retailers in South and Northeast Philadelphia sold more than 11,000 guns that were later recovered in criminal investigations or confiscated from owners who obtained them illegally, the report said. a study of firearms tracking data in Pennsylvania by the gun control group Brady, the most comprehensive analysis of its kind in decades.

The report’s conclusions confirmed what law enforcement officials have long known. A small percentage of gun shops — 1.2 percent of the state’s licensed dealers, according to Brady — were responsible for 57 percent of firearms that ended up in the hands of criminals through illegal resale or outright purchases by gun buyers who turned them over to people who excluded were the possession of weapons.

A similar dynamic exists in cities like Baltimore and Chicago, which have no legal gun dealers in their jurisdictions. The purchasing activities migrate to neighboring areas or to nearby states where firearms can easily be traded in the trunks of cars.

Gun violence in Baltimore has declined somewhat over the past two years, and this year the number of homicides will slowly drop below 300. for the first time in almost ten years. But it still remains one of the most dangerous cities in the country, and many of the guns used to commit crimes there are transported from other places with looser gun laws — made easier by its central location on I-95 -corridor.

City officials estimate that 60 to 70 percent of firearms used in crimes occurred outside Maryland’s borders between 2017 and 2021.

The purpose of the lawsuit is to zero in on “trends in how crime guns are entering communities,” said Alla Lefkowitz, director of litigation at Everytown, who helped draft the complaint.

“Are one or two gun shops responsible for most of the crime guns in a city – or does it come from a more diverse source?” she asked. “Do most crime guns come from within or outside the state? What are the most popular crime weapons? This database is a very powerful tool.”