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--In a concerted effort to track the flow of guns, ATF and police in America's largest cities launched a campaign to trace every crime gun the police recovered, part of ATF's Youth Crime Gun Interdiction Initiative, nicknamed Yogi. The number of guns followed through the bureau's national tracing center increased more than 400%, to 197,537 last year, from 37,181 in 1990. Yogi fractured long-held myths and gave police a much clearer picture of how guns really migrate--so much clearer that at least 20 cities and counties felt empowered to file tobacco-style liability lawsuits targeting the firearms industry. Until lately, says Harvard's Kennedy, "we were blind men groping around in the dark."
Fundamental to these changes was a revolution in the way law-enforcement agencies saw the nation's gun crisis, a revolution born within ATF, the agency gun owners have always loved to hate.
In the early 1990s police typically asked ATF to trace guns only in specific cases, often homicides. Popular wisdom held that most crime guns were stolen guns and therefore untraceable. Within ATF, however, a core group of special agents began an effort to encourage police in cities with soaring homicide rates to trace guns more frequently. Despite the sporadic tracing, ATF by the early '90s had accumulated a rich database, though it had the computers and savvy to conduct only the most basic kinds of analysis. In September 1994, the bureau offered researchers at Northeastern University access to its tracing data to see how computers could be used to identify sources of crime guns nationwide. The study came up with a surprising finding: a tiny percentage of dealers--one-half of 1%--accounted for 50% of all guns traced.
In 1995 Kennedy tapped the bureau's records as part of the Boston Gun Project, an experiment to reduce the number of homicides among the city's youth. He analyzed traces of guns recovered in Boston, which a few years earlier had become one of the few cities in the nation to request ATF to trace every single gun recovered by police. "The results were just astonishing," Kennedy says. He recalls the first meeting when he presented his findings. "I don't think I had ever seen anyone's jaw really drop before," he said.
His study showed, first, that about a third of Boston's crime guns came from federally licensed gun dealers based in Massachusetts. He and his colleagues calculated the time that elapsed between the date a gun was acquired from a dealer and the date it was recovered by police, a measure known as "time-to-crime." Agents had told Kennedy that the faster a gun completed the journey from dealer to crime scene, the more likely it was sold by a trafficker or corrupt dealer. Kennedy's team discovered that about a quarter of the traced guns had a time-to-crime of less than two years, indicating that guns used by Boston's young killers tended to be new guns. This finding dovetailed with what project members had learned in conversations with gang members. They wanted guns, especially semiautomatic pistols, that were "literally still in the shrink wrap," Kennedy says.
When Kennedy's team members sharpened the focus to individual brands, they found that guns traced to one company--Lorcin Engineering, a member of the Ring of Fire--had a short time-to-crime in 90% of traces.