click here for Video by The Atlantic concerning how guns are traced .Aug 06, 2019 | 772 videos
Video by David Freid On television, when a perpetrator leaves a gun at the scene, a quick computer search can point law enforcement to the weapon’s owner. In reality—at least in the United States—no such database of firearms exists. To have one would be illegal, according to legislation that passed in Congress in 1986, lobbied for by the National Rifle Association. Instead, we have the National Tracing Center, in Martinsburg, West Virginia. There, a nonsearchable index of paperwork related to gun purchases is housed in hundreds of shipping containers and file boxes. The small federal agency operates with technology so antediluvian that it precludes the use of an Excel spreadsheet. It is the only facility in the country that tracks firearms from a manufacturer to a purchaser. In David Freid’s short documentary Guns Found Here, Special Agent Charles J. Houser of the Bureau for Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, who runs the facility, reveals the Kafkaesque record-keeping systems that he deftly employs to manage more than 67 million files on a shoestring budget. “The technology that we use is largely designed to prevent us from being able to create the registration system,” Houser explains in the film, which was recently nominated for an Emmy. Every day, Houser and his team field more than 8,000 trace requests from authorities across the country; annually, the facility traces more than 450,000 guns to their owners to help solve violent crimes. Some of these crimes are mass shootings. In 2007, the center performed a trace on the gun used in the murder of 32 students and faculty at Virginia Tech; in 2011, the agency tracked the gun involved in the shooting of 19 people, including Representative Gabrielle Giffords, in Tucson, Arizona. “Finding the owner of a gun crime more quickly could save lives,” Freid told me, “but anything that even remotely looks like a searchable database is against the wishes of the original legislation that created this.” In the San Bernardino, Calif., shooting that killed 14 people, law enforcement officials called Tashfeen Malik and Syed Rizwan Farook terrorists. The same was true in Orlando, Fla., where Omar Mateen killed 49 people at a nightclub.
But in Charleston, S.C., where Dylann Roof murdered nine African-Americans at a historically black church, law enforcement did not label him a terrorist. The same was true in Las Vegas, where Stephen Paddock killed 58 people at a concert. Under the law, terrorism is a violent, criminal act intended to intimidate civilians and governments for an ideological, political or religious purpose. In this case, we have yet to see evidence that the attacks in Texas were politically motivated, though certainly there has been suspicion that there was racial animus because the first two victims were African-American. Anne Barnard, Beirut Bureau Chief: The words “terrorist” and “terrorism” are problematic because there is no universal consensus on what they mean. Thus, the decision to label an attack or attacker “terrorist” is almost always at least partly a political judgment. |