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Old 03-13-2013, 12:11 PM   #57
xoxoxoBruce
The future is unwritten
 
Join Date: Oct 2002
Posts: 71,105
The reality is most guns are untraceable, even legally bought guns that haven't changed hands.
Quote:
"There is a perception -- even among law enforcement agencies -- that if you send a serial number from a gun up here, that we plug it into a computer and the name of a gun owner pops out, as if there's a national registration system," says Charles Houser, who has been chief of the center since 2005. "There's no such thing."

No such thing, because federal law prohibits the creation of a national database of gun purchases. That ban was first slipped into an appropriations bill in Congress in 1979 and became permanent law in 1986, in a law sponsored by two strong supporters of gun rights, Idaho Republican James McClure and Missouri Democrat Harold Volkmer. Both men passed away in 2011.

The ban on a federal gun sale database has been strongly supported by the powerful National Rifle Association. The NRA told us it "is opposed to any registry of law abiding gun owners."

So workers at the National Tracing Center are left with an antiquated system to trace 350,000 guns a year, requiring them to review by hand tons of paper records and 500 million entries on microfilm. Critics say it's the law enforcement equivalent of the horse and buggy.
This is outrageous.
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