Clinton Says L.A. Joining Program to Trace Guns

President Clinton announced Saturday that 10 cities, including Los Angeles, will be added to a computer system that helps authorities pursue illegal gun traffickers by tracing guns sold to juveniles.

Clinton said the program, which currently involves 17 cities, including Salinas and Inglewood, has tracked 37,000 guns used in crimes and that many of them were linked to gun-selling rings and dishonest gun dealers.

“Too many of our young people are drawn to guns and violence as a way of life,” Clinton said in his weekly radio address. “Over the past decades, the number of gun murders by juveniles has skyrocketed by 300%. This is simply unacceptable. We know we must break this deadly trend.”

The program, which Clinton proposed during his 1996 reelection campaign, takes information provided by local law enforcement officials on guns they have seized and feeds it into a computer system run by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. The information is then matched against other databases in an attempt to trace guns back to their sources.

The need is acute in Los Angeles, which is one of the nation’s leading centers of gun crimes. Each year, according to ATF estimates, about 30,000 guns are recovered in Los Angeles County, overwhelming the ability of authorities to trace the weapons’ origins by using the traditional channels of fax or telephone.

Los Angeles County Sheriff Sherman Block and interim city Police Chief Bayan Lewis embraced the idea when contacted about the program last week, said Jim Adamcik, an assistant chief of the ATF office in Los Angeles. The ATF plans to begin training personnel from both departments soon.

“For the first time, we know where the juveniles are getting these guns, how they are getting them and what kinds of guns they are using,” Clinton said. “Guns are finding their way quickly from legitimate retail stores to black markets through a network of gun traffickers and corrupt gun dealers.

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“Make no mistake--gun traffickers are funneling guns to lawless youth,” Clinton added. “We know how they operate, and we intend to shut them down.”

An ATF analysis released Saturday said 4 in 10 guns used in crimes and recovered by police were in the possession of juveniles and that the most commonly used gun for individuals younger than 24 was a semiautomatic pistol.

Law enforcement authorities say that finding the initial point of sale of a gun is essential to reducing illicit weapon sales. “The first step to stop firearms trafficking is to see where the sources are,” said John Torres, another assistant chief of the ATF office in Los Angeles.

The computer program aids investigators by providing information about the patterns of illegal gun movements to juveniles.

For example, the program “could link a crime gun that enforcement officials in Inglewood . . . submit for tracing with a crime gun that officials in Jersey City, N.J., submit for tracing by showing that both were sold by the same federal firearms licensee or purchased by the same individual,” the ATF report said.

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In one case, authorities tracing the source of a number of weapons recovered in unrelated crimes were able to identify a Tennessee gun seller who bought weapons from gun shows in Kentucky and sold them illegally in Washington. D.C., an ATF official said.

Last year, the ATF’s National Tracing Center in West Virginia tracked the history of about 100,000 guns nationwide, Adamcik said. Eighty-six criminal investigations are underway in the 17 cities in the program, an ATF official said Saturday.

In Inglewood, investigators were able to trace 65% of 126 firearms seized during a nine-month study, officials said. Guns found in Inglewood typically originated from retail sales within the state. Those findings tend to contradict the widespread belief that most guns used in crimes are stolen or purchased out of the state. The most popular handgun in Inglewood was the Smith & Wesson revolver.

In other crime-related matters, Clinton said he was disappointed that a Senate committee recently rejected his proposal to require federal firearms dealers to provide child-safety locks and urged the full Senate to consider the idea.

“The juvenile crime bill must be comprehensive. Of course it must get tough on violent juvenile offenders, but it also must cut off their access to guns,” he said.

The president also called upon law enforcement agencies to continue conducting background checks on prospective adult gun buyers, despite the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that strikes down part of the Brady Act that mandates those checks.

The law has already stopped more than 150,000 “fugitives, felons and stalkers” from buying handguns, he said.

Clinton said Atty. Gen. Janet Reno and Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin, after meeting with law enforcement authorities from around the country, have confirmed that “the overwhelming majority of police departments are continuing to do the responsible thing: to perform these background checks voluntarily because they work.”

In addition to Los Angeles, the $11-million expansion of the gun-tracking program adds Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, Houston, Miami, Tucson, Minneapolis, Cincinnati and Gary, Ind.

In addition to Salinas and Inglewood, the original cities are Atlanta; Baltimore; Birmingham, Ala.; Boston; Bridgeport, Conn.; Cleveland; Jersey City, N.J.; Memphis, Tenn.; Milwaukee; New York; Richmond, Va.; St. Louis; San Antonio; Seattle and Washington.

Cimons reported from Washington and McDonnell from Los Angeles.