Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [60]
I thought about this one. If I ever did get down to actually selling guns, of course I would admit my customers. But they would have to ring the bell first and I would have to be home, but yes—they’d have the run of the place or at least my office, where my FFL is currently openly displayed as per federal regulations. It is taped to my wall, above my official National Rifle Association membership card.
I received my license on June 22, 1992, well within the forty-five days in which ATF is required to accept or deny an application.
No one called to verify my application. No one interviewed me to see if in fact I planned to sell weapons or not. There was no federal requirement that I first check with authorities in Maryland and Baltimore about specific local statutes that might affect my ability to peddle guns in the heart of my manicured, upscale, utterly established Baltimore neighborhood. As far as the federal government was concerned, I was in business and could begin placing orders for as many weapons as I chose. In short, I could supply an urban army with modern, high-powered weapons of state-of-the-art lethality, and ATF wouldn’t know anything about it. The bureau would not know, that is, unless the weapons began turning up during arrests by ATF agents or local police, or unless ATF inspectors conducted a routine compliance audit. Federal law allows ATF to do only one such audit a year of each licensee, unless the agency has a specific investigative reason for doing more.
In one crucial area, federal firearms law explicitly favors gun dealers over consumers. Any consumer who knowingly makes a false statement or representation during a firearms transaction, as Curtis Williams found when he bought a gun for Nicholas Elliot, automatically commits a felony and faces a fine of up to $5,000 and a prison term of up to five years. Yet any Federal Firearms Licensee—a dealer, manufacturer, importer, or distributor—who commits the same offense faces a maximum fine of only $1,000 and imprisonment for not more than one year. In short, the consumer commits a felony; the dealer a misdemeanor. The distinction is crucial. A dealer convicted of a mere misdemeanor can still keep his Federal Firearms License; if convicted of a felony, he cannot.
In cases where dealers are suspected of knowingly and willfully selling guns to crooks and traffickers, ATF can be a tenacious, sly, and forceful investigator. The agency is fond of saying that dealers who commit such violations will get caught sooner or later, once the ATF National Tracing Center at Landover, Maryland, detects evidence of their wayward dealings. Indeed, in the 10 percent of crimes where law-enforcement officials actually request a federal trace, the tracing network often proves an effective investigative tool both in solving crimes and for identifying renegade dealers. There is a fundamental problem with this approach, however: by the time the tracing center does get involved, the guns in question have been used in crime, typically serious crime involving assault, homicide, or narcotics peddling. ATF gets another notch in its holster, the illegal dealer is put out of business, but society is left to tend its wounds—grief, disability, surgical bills, lost income, psychic trauma, and the increasingly pervasive feeling that one is not safe in one’s own home.
At times through its history ATF has tried to take a more proactive stance toward regulating the flow of firearms. The agency is immensely proud of the lawmen it counts as its ancestors, in particular Eliot Ness, the legendary commander of “The Untouchables.” Walk into the offices of many senior ATF officials and you’ll find a framed poster from the 1987 movie The Untouchables, which