jobu07
Contributing Member
Simply an ignorant and blatently dishonest column here folks...
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/local/story/418762p-353689c.html
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/local/story/418762p-353689c.html
Guns blazed for all to see
The blaze of Times Square would be just the place for a billboard-sized electronic map of the United States and the flashing words "WHERE THE GUNS COME FROM!"
A relatively simple bit of wiring could make the screen a giant facsimile of what yours truly saw seven years ago at the Regional Crime Gun Center run by the Federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and Explosives.
Back then, the governor of Virginia was howling about some medical waste from a Richmond landfill that had been traced back to Brooklyn.
"This type of waste is against the law," then-Gov. James Gilmore said. "It's something we're just not going to put up with."
Gilmore failed to perceive any irony in bloody hospital sheets from Brooklyn being dumped in a state that had flooded New York with a half-million illegal guns that killed thousands, too many of them children.
In fact, Virginia was the primary source for illegal guns in New York. ATF Special Agent Robert Cucinelli provided dramatic proof of that when he sat down at a computer in the Gun Center. He summoned a map of the United States onto the screen.
"You can ask this machine anything you want," he was quoted saying that day in 1999.
Cucinelli instructed the computer to show with a red dot the place of purchase of every gun recovered in our city. He clicked the mouse and the whole Eastern Seaboard south of Richmond turned solid red. Virginia had the most dots, followed by North Carolina, South Carolina, Florida and Georgia.
"It's a shock value," Cucinelli said.
Cucinelli went back to work and the Gun Center continued logging the truth right up to the morning the twin towers were attacked and the ATF office was destroyed. Post-9/11 pundits liked to say that we were living in a changed world, but one constant became apparent after the ATF opened a new Gun Center in Sunset Park in Brooklyn. The guns were still pouring in from that zone below Richmond. The sea of red grew redder.
The facts did indeed have shock value and that is no doubt why the National Rifle Association "helped" Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-Kansas) draft legislation to keep the truth from public view and protect the gun dealers from lawsuits. Tiahrt tacked the measure onto an appropriations bill just as Congress was departing for its August recess in 2003.
"It has to do with freedom," Tiahrt said.
The measure passed and was made even tougher in 2005. The present law says no government funds "may be used to disclose part or all of the contents of the Firearms Trace System database maintained by the National Trace Center of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives ... to anyone other than a Federal, State, or local law enforcement agency or a prosecutor solely in connection with and for use in a bona fide criminal investigation or prosecution and then only such information as pertains to the geographic jurisdiction of the law enforcement agency requesting the disclosure and not for use in any civil action."
In other words, ATF would be violating the law if it showed that shocking computer map to a member of the public. And trace data could not be used in lawsuits such as the city brought against 15 rogue gun dealers this week. The city says it was forced to use data collected between 1994 and 2001.
ATF could and does still provide the NYPD with the particulars regarding any gun the cops submit to be traced. ATF says the cops are then free to do whatever they want with the information. The city Law Department is not so sure.
But a layman's reading of the law suggests that the NYPD could legally assemble the individual trace results into a database of its own. The ATF runs the gun center with a half-dozen people, so the NYPD shouldn't require more than that to generate a map such as ATF can no longer show a reporter or any other member of the public.
The city could then put up that billboard-sized map with the flashing words "WHERE THE GUNS COME FROM!" along with "WHAT THE NRA DOES NOT WANT YOU TO KNOW!"
Originally published on May 18, 2006
