• Don’t weaken Brady Don’t weaken Brady The Omnibus Appropriations Bill now before the Senate is supposed to concern itself with funding government agencies and services. But it’s more than that. Tucked inside this 1,448-page spending bill is a provision
• Don’t weaken Brady
Don’t weaken Brady
The Omnibus Appropriations Bill now before the Senate is supposed to concern itself with funding government agencies and services. But it’s more than that. Tucked inside this 1,448-page spending bill is a provision that would severely weaken the government’s ability to track illegal guns. The provision was sponsored in the House version of the spending bill by Rep. Todd Tiahrt, R-Kan.
The provision would require the FBI to destroy gun-buyer records 24 hours after a weapon is sold. The Brady law now in effect requires the FBI to keep these records for up to 90 days. That requirement should prevail. Without it, the agency can’t review gun sales and track missing weapons in an effort to keep them out of the hands of criminals, the mentally ill, violent spouses and terrorists.
The National Rifle Association is playing the privacy card, arguing that the government has no business building a database on law-abiding gun owners. But in a post-Sept. 11 world, the FBI would benefit from having such a database to help it track – or thwart – a suspected terrorist who purchased a weapon. Surely records on gun buyers are at least as important in the war on terror as book-borrowing records from public libraries.
A second disturbing part of Tiahrt’s provision would prevent the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms from issuing what the NRA calls a “burdensome” rule requiring gun dealers to take regular inventories of their stock. The ATF says the rule would help it make dealers keep better track of their weapons. The military-style rifle used by the D.C.-area snipers in 2002 had been stolen from a gun store in Washington state. The store owner apparently checked his inventory so seldom that he never noticed this theft or that of more than 230 other “missing” firearms. The ATF says the high number of inventory errors at some gun stores is a serious problem because missing firearms can’t be traced. That’s a compelling practical argument and makes the case for issuing the rule.
The Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence should keep the pressure on senators to resist the NRA’s efforts to gut federal gun-control rules. A new study by the centrist Americans for Gun Safety Foundation has bolstered the Brady Campaign. The study says 120 firearms dealers, including three in the St. Louis area, are providing a disproportionately large share of weapons used in crimes, a finding some dealers dispute. The foundation is calling for a “High Crime Dealer Watch List” to alert the public about such dealers. That could put more pressure on gun dealers to be more selective about who their customers are.
Missouri and Illinois senators should support laws that help the government track illegal weapons by demanding that the NRA-backed rider be cut from the appropriations bill. On Tuesday, Missouri GOP Sens. Christopher S. “Kit” Bond and Jim Talent voted to cut off debate and pass the bill with the rider intact. So did Sen. Peter Fitzgerald, R-Ill. Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., voted against the bill. Republicans should join the effort to yank this NRA-backed attempt to undercut the Brady law.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
