How do you think that allowing just any random person who asks for it access to trace data helps with illegal firearms trafficking? You can't trace an illegally-traded firearm until it's in your possession and you have the indentifying information on it anyway. If it's not in your possession, you don't know what gun to trace in the first place. Once you've got it, if you don't know it's been illegally traded, you have no reason to trace it in the first place unless you suspect it's been stolen, in which case you have jurisdiction to investigate the theft and you can get trace data. If you do know it's been illegally traded, a crime's been committed, bam, you have jurisdiction. Where's the problem here? It's not like you can ask the BATF for a list of all stolen or illegally sold firearms currently within your jurisdiction. They don't know, because they don't know where the guns are or when one's been illegally sold unless either someone is caught making an illegal sale, or it turns up among other stolen property or in the hands of someone who shouldn't legally have it. The firearm trace database is not a crystal ball or an oracle. You can't get information out of it that isn't there in the first place.
For that matter, the mere fact that a firearm is in the trace data does not mean it has ever been used in a crime or illegally traded. But anti-gun organizations blithely assume that any gun on which trace data exists is automatically somehow criminal in some way.
I really completely fail to see what you're driving at here. So I'll repeat: the Tiahrt Amendment basically does two things: 1. It forbids the BATF from assembling a firearm owners database or keeping NICS records indefinitely, both of which are already illegal, and 2. It prevents people who have no legitimate legal need for trace information from going on open-ended fishing expeditions through the trace data.
Do you have a problem with either of those? Can you actually come up with any convincing example of a legitimate, plausible scenario in which some agency that needs the data for a legitimate purpose (as distinct from "wants it for political ends") is prevented by the Tiahrt Amendment from getting it?
no subject
For that matter, the mere fact that a firearm is in the trace data does not mean it has ever been used in a crime or illegally traded. But anti-gun organizations blithely assume that any gun on which trace data exists is automatically somehow criminal in some way.
I really completely fail to see what you're driving at here. So I'll repeat: the Tiahrt Amendment basically does two things:
1. It forbids the BATF from assembling a firearm owners database or keeping NICS records indefinitely, both of which are already illegal, and
2. It prevents people who have no legitimate legal need for trace information from going on open-ended fishing expeditions through the trace data.
Do you have a problem with either of those? Can you actually come up with any convincing example of a legitimate, plausible scenario in which some agency that needs the data for a legitimate purpose (as distinct from "wants it for political ends") is prevented by the Tiahrt Amendment from getting it?