Clinton Takes Aim at Rogue Gun Dealers

President Clinton introduced a national computer database Monday to help track down those who sell guns to young people, further fattening his portfolio of election-year crime-fighting initiatives.

Under a $2-million pilot program, a wide range of information about guns used in crimes by young people will be fed into the database from police in 17 cities. The data will be made available to local and federal prosecutors in hopes of tracing and prosecuting rogue gun dealers.

Surrounded at the White House by police and prosecutors, Clinton declared that every gun used in a crime in the 17 cities will go through the Treasury Department’s system. “Those who illegally peddle guns to our children will get a simple message: We will find you. We will prosecute you. We will punish you,” he said.

The new computer database, called Project Lead, was developed as part of a program first announced in late 1993 by the Treasury Department’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

Citing that long history, the campaign of Republican presidential candidate Bob Dole scorned the announcement as old news recycled for an election year.

“Leave it to Bill Clinton to wait until four months before the election to embrace the idea,” said Nelson Warfield, Dole’s campaign spokesman. Still, he said, the plan “sounds like a step in the right direction.”

The California cities of Inglewood and Salinas are among the 17 in the project, along with New York, Boston, Baltimore, San Antonio, Seattle and Washington, D.C.

Finding the people who provide guns to young lawbreakers is no easy task. Federal authorities collect information on retail gun sales, including serial numbers. But after an initial sale guns may change hands again many times.

Some young people get their weapons from “straw” purchasers, who buy guns from dealers to sell them on the black market. But other people steal guns, or simply take weapons that are left in their homes. The experts acknowledge that they have no clue what share of weapons comes to young lawbreakers from each source.

Authorities are hoping that, using the various pieces of information in the database, they can piece together the source of the weapon--whether it came through an illicit dealer or some other source. They are also counting on young criminals’ fondness for stylish new guns, the easiest to trace because they have been in circulation a shorter time.

Several criminal justice specialists generally hailed the move, saying that it is well worth the effort, even if its benefits might be slightly oversold in an election year.

John DiIulio, a professor at Princeton University, said it was not clear that the database would uncover the kind of “single shadowy supplier” of which Clinton spoke in his comments. But, he said, such a rich data source could become an “irresistible” tool to many police departments and could yield results when used with other data-collecting mechanisms.

In Inglewood and Salinas, authorities said that the program is a welcome addition to their participation in another federally funded effort to halt the carnage involving youths and guns. “I am just getting tired of body-bagging young kids,” Inglewood Police Chief Oliver Thompson said.

Last year, Thompson said, the city received a $750,000 grant from the Department of Justice to fund intervention and enforcement programs aimed at reducing the number of gun-related crimes involving youths.

That effort, Thompson said, allowed the city to hire an additional police officer, prosecutor and probation officer--all focusing on firearm crimes by persons 25 or younger.

While Thompson said that he did not have any ready statistics to illustrate Inglewood’s success in targeting weapons crimes involving youths, Salinas Police Capt. Larry Myers credited the stepped-up focus on youth and guns with a sharp decrease in homicides.

Last year, he said, the city of 122,000 had 24 homicides, the majority of them involving gangs and weapons. So far this year, he said, Salinas has had only three homicides, and only one involved a gang member--using a baseball bat, not a firearm.

“We are making headway,” Myers said.

Richter reported from Washington and Krikorian from Los Angeles.