Gun Lobby Helps Block Data Collection by Crimefighters

By Michael C. Bender - Feb 12, 2013
For two weeks, bullets pierced two dozen cars driven through Detroit’s suburbs as police puzzled over who was firing. Unlike most states, Michigan has a tool that helped lead to an arrest: a pistol registry.

Without that database of buyers and sellers, police said the investigation would have taken longer, more people might have been injured or someone might have been killed, before they arrested an unemployed geologist in connection with the crimes on Nov. 5.

The story of what worked in Michigan -- one of six states that require registration of at least some types of firearms -- is also the story of what isn’t happening elsewhere. Gun-rights advocates, led by the National Rifle Association, have successfully campaigned against firearm registries across the U.S. They narrowly lost a bid last year to eliminate Michigan’s.

“The NRA has been extremely effective at guarding their patrons, the firearms industry, from having to provide data by consistently ginning up a fear that the federal government is going to come for your guns,” said Mark D. Jones, a former U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives special agent who is a senior law-enforcement adviser at the University of Chicago Crime Lab. “It slows down investigations in a profound way.”

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http://www.bloomberg.com/news/print/2013-02-13/gun-lobby-helps-block-data-collection-by-crimefighters.html