cuchulainn
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from the Miami Herald
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/7294898.htm
http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/7294898.htm
Records on gun owners assailed
Lawmakers consider a bill that would stop police from tracking some gun sales, a tactic that prosecutors say helps convict criminals.
BY MARC CAPUTO
[email protected]
TALLAHASSEE - Invoking Adolf Hitler's and Fidel Castro's atrocities, a handful of conservative lawmakers have filed a bill to prohibit police from compiling gun-owner and gun-sale lists, saying it infringes on citizens' rights to privacy and to own firearms.
The proposal, supported by the National Rifle Association, says the records are not legitimate law-enforcement tools and are instead part of ``a phony excuse to harass and abuse American citizens.''
The bill will be heard today in a House judiciary committee alongside two other measures likely to provoke controversy.
One would ''immunize'' gun ranges from environmental lawsuits concerning lead and arsenic poisoning from ammunition. The other seeks to amend the state Constitution's right of privacy to give parents potential authority over an underage daughter's abortion.
If approved by the committee, they could be among the first bills passed by the House in 2004.
Rep. Dennis Baxley, an Ocala Republican, said he's troubled by the idea that police agencies across the state are tracking people who are exercising a right enshrined in the state and U.S. constitutions.
PRIME SPONSOR
Baxley said he's the prime sponsor of the NRA-backed bill limiting the liabilities of the 400 gun ranges in Florida because he wants to prevent ''environmental extremism.'' He's also co-sponsoring the gun-tracking bill with Rep. Lindsay Harrington, R-Punta Gorda.
A government employee who violates the provisions of the gun-tracking bill could face a five-year prison sentence and a fine of $5,000. The agency involved could be fined another $250,000 but wouldn't be required to furnish the employee with a taxpayer-backed lawyer.
''We're at a point in our history where the government is trying to slowly take away our rights, piece by piece, and I'm trying to stop that,'' Baxley said. ``By accumulating all this data, it could fall into the wrong hands. And that could be a treacherous thing.''
To drive the point home, the gun-tracking bill mentions Hitler and Castro by name and says both favored gun control and registration to maintain control over the population.
''It's clear what's going on here. These are polarizing social issues designed to excite conservatives in an election year,'' said Rep. Dan Gelber, D-Miami Beach. ``But what's really offensive is the way they're going about it. The most outrageous thing is invoking the atrocities of the Holocaust to pass what's really an anti law-enforcement bill. It's in bad taste.''
Gelber, a former federal prosecutor, said that prohibiting police and prosecutors from tracking gun ownership will hamper law enforcement agencies, which often collect gun-sale information from pawnshops, gun stores and even federal authorities. They then use that data to establish a chain of custody in gun-crime cases to prove that a weapon was in a perpetrator's hand.
Police track the gun's serial number in a fashion similar to the way they can track a car's license plate.
The Miami-Dade state attorney's office said Tuesday that gun-tracking records have helped prosecutors catch and convict criminals.
In one case, a group of Miami police officers who stole a gun from a drug dealer and planted it on a suspect were caught after police tracked the gun to a previous arrest made by one of the officers. In another instance, prosecutors tracked a gun to the father of a man accused of shooting three of his Miami Beach neighbors in June after a birthday party kept him awake. The father told police he had given his son the gun.
The state attorney's office executive director, Theodore Mannelli, said the cases underscore the importance of collecting and storing gun-related data. Still, he said, the office has yet to take a position on the bill.
EARLY IN PROCESS
''We're still early in the process, so we want to see how this evolves,'' Mannelli said. ``But we do have some concerns.''
Among them: The bill doesn't clearly spell out when police agencies can collect gun-ownership information. And the measure seems to conflict with a law requiring pawnshops to furnish police with records of gun purchases, which the shop owners must keep for a year.
''If you don't have to register your television sets and your steak knives, which aren't protected by the Constitution, why do police have the right to track this?'' NRA board member Marion Hammer said.