DON'T ASSUME VIRGINIA SUPPLIES GUNS TO NEW YORK'S CRIMINALS

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, February 20, 1993                   TAG: 9302220268
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-11   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: DAVID B. KOPEL
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium
DON'T ASSUME VIRGINIA SUPPLIES GUNS TO NEW YORK'S CRIMINALS
IN THE VIRGINIA legislature, Democrats and Republicans are arguing about what kind of gun laws will slow the flow of Virginia guns into the hands of New York City street criminals. Omitted from the debate has been the most important question: Do Virginia guns actually supply New York's criminals?
The evidence suggests not.
True, Gov. Wilder and Batman both insist that Virginia is the main source of guns used in violent crimes in New York City. And gun-control advocates recite statistics indicating that the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms found that 41 percent of New York City's "crime guns" came from Virginia.
But the bureau does not trace every gun confiscated by the police. In New York City, the police ask the BATF to trace only 8 percent or less of the guns that the police seize.
The small fraction of guns that the BATF is asked to trace may not be representative of crime guns as a whole. That fact was clearly demonstrated during the 1989 controversy over "assault weapons."
In early 1989, two journalists from the Cox Newspaper chain studied gun traces run by the BATF and announced that 10 percent of the guns traced by the bureau were "assault weapons," and that hence 10 percent of crime guns were "assault weapons."
But the actual data from police departments contradicted the assertions based on BATF traces. For example, in Los Angeles, 19 percent of the guns that the BATF was asked to trace were assault weapons. But when the Los Angeles police took a comprehensive inventory of the guns that they had taken from criminals, they found that only 1 percent were assault weapons.
The same story was repeated in the police departments of other major cities such as New York, San Francisco, Washington, Chicago, Denver and San Diego. Assault weapons usually amounted to 1 percent of crime guns, sometimes as much as 3 percent, but never anywhere close to 10 percent.
Given the wide gap between BATF traces of assault weapons (10 percent of the total) and actual police data about use of the guns in crime (only 1 percent of the total), is it safe to use BATF traces to lay the blame for New York's gun crimes on Virginia? Probably not.
Most of the guns traced from New York back to Virginia were not connected with violent crime. Last year, only 32 of the guns that so traced were thought to be related to violent crimes.
True, it's been claimed that all the Virginia guns were taken from "crime scenes," but you have to keep in mind what constitutes a crime in New York City: just owning an unlicensed handgun. Except for influential folks like Donald Trump, it's very difficult to get a license to own or carry a gun in New York City. Accordingly, as many as 2 million New Yorkers own illegal handguns, since they know that the city is dangerous and the police cannot be everywhere at once.
Thus, when a policeman conducting a traffic stop finds an unlicensed handgun under the front seat of a secretary's car, the secretary gets charged with felony possession of an unlicensed gun. And if the gun came from Virginia, it's counted as a New York City crime gun, although most people don't consider owning a handgun a crime.
Indeed, the frightened secretary is more likely to own a traceable handgun than are street criminals. Ordinary folks who own guns for protection rarely file off a gun's serial number (thus making it untraceable). But according to a National Institute for Justice study of convicted felons, 60 percent consider a gun's untraceability "very important" and another 21 percent consider it "a little" or "somewhat" important.
Of course, 32 of the violent criminals who were caught in New York City had Virginia guns bearing serial numbers. Were those guns smuggled in along the so-called iron corridor of Interstate 95, after being bought by straw purchasers in Virginia? Again, the BATF trace data don't say.
In tracing the guns, the BATF simply looked up the serial numbers to see where the gun was originally sold. The bureau did not attempt to determine how the gun moved from Virginia to New York. Thus, a gun stolen in Virginia and subsequently shipped to New York shows up as a Virginia gun in the New York trace data.
So where's the proof that guns sold over the counter in Virginia are a large part of New York City's gun crime problem? It isn't there.
Before jumping into a wrestling match over how to fix the problem of Virginia guns being smuggled into New York, Gov. Wilder, the legislature (and Batman) would have done better to determine whether there really was a problem in the first place.

David B. Kopel is a former New York City prosecutor and an associate policy analyst with the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C.

by Archana Subramaniam by CNB