Lethal Passage_ The Story of a Gun - Erik Larson [69]
It was this bill too that reduced to a misdemeanor the penalty for dealers found to have violated record-keeping rules, while retaining the felony charge for consumers who did likewise.
Before the act was finally passed, Representative Volkmer called it “the second most important step in the history of American gun owners. The first was the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.” Representative Hughes said the bill “would elevate gun dealers to a special level of privilege never before seen in the law.”
ATF got the message. First came Congress’s punitive $10-million budget cut, then ATF’s brush with dissolution, and finally McClure-Volkmer. “I don’t know what kind of syndrome it is when you get batted over the head repeatedly,” Rex Davis told me, “but it certainly turns your attention away from the direction you were going.”
In following years, ATF used its mandate as the nation’s firearms cop to concentrate more and more resources on mainstream investigations of narcotics gangs, terrorist groups, and motorcycle gangs. From 1988 through 1992, ATF’s law-enforcement divisions ranked narcotics crime as their top priority, followed by violent crime committed with firearms. “These are safe activities, and sexy activities in terms of public perception,” Davis said. “With dealers, they’ve had their hands slapped several different ways. So it’s a natural reaction.”
ATF remains less than enthusiastic about policing the vast dealer network. From 1975 through 1990, ATF revoked an average of ten licenses a year. The low was in 1978, with none, the high in 1986, with twenty-seven. This rate seems downright skimpy given the sheer numbers of licenses and the rate of violations discovered whenever ATF’s skeleton crew of inspectors does its routine compliance audits. In 1990, for example, inspectors conducted 8,471 of these routine inspections; they found violations in 90 percent of them.
But revocation can be a tortuous process, as ATF found when in 1989 it at last moved to revoke the license of a Michigan dealer doing business as Al’s Loan Office. In arresting and prosecuting Curtis Williams, the man who accompanied Nicholas Elliot to Guns Unlimited, the bureau acted with breathtaking speed; in contrast, its dealings with Al’s Loan show remarkable forbearance.
In ten inspections, beginning in 1976, ATF inspectors found repeated violations of ATF record-keeping regulations, many of them serious and the kind that could have put guns into the hands of felons and traffickers. Al’s Loan had failed to keep accurate records in a separate bound book of all its firearm acquisitions and sales. It had failed to make sure that customers properly completed form 4473. Moreover, the inspectors found, Al’s Loan had sold guns to people prohibited by federal law from buying them.
Far from whisking officials of Al’s Loan off to jail, ATF inspectors patiently sat down with them to instruct them in the proper recordkeeping procedures, as they did following inspections in 1976, 1978, 1979, 1980, and 1981. After a 1982 inspection, the bureau at last flexed some muscle. It wrote the pawnshop an admonitory letter, setting out the dealer’s violations. The letter, the first phase in the carefully choreographed dance ATF must go through in trying to revoke a dealer’s license, warned Al’s Loan that “your license is contingent on your compliance with law and regulations and that continued violations may lead to revocation of your license.”
ATF agents inspected Al’s records again in 1983 and again found the same kinds of violations. Again ATF wrote an admonitory letter.
The violations continued. Three more inspections took place, in 1985, 1987, and 1988, each followed by another admonitory letter.
At last ATF lost patience. On March 31, 1989, thirteen years after inspectors first discovered violations at Al’s Loan, the bureau revoked its license.
The dealer