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No one can say whether the decline in dealers and handgun production had an effect on gunshot crime in America. During the same period, however--1993 through 1996--the nationwide total of violent crimes committed with firearms fell 20%, the total of handgun homicides 23%. And both rates have continued falling. In 1997, for the first time, the nation's homicide rate fell below that of 1968, the year that marked the initiation of America's three-decade dance with murder.
Other forces contributed. The nation's biggest cities, armed with new tracing data and new confidence that the flow of crime guns could be halted, launched campaigns to get guns off their streets. The Boston Gun Project quickly proved one of the most successful and became a source of hope for cities around the country.
With its initial studies completed, the project got under way in May 1996. Guided by tracing data, Boston police and ATF attacked the illegal-firearms market. "We were able to shut down about five different traffickers right off the bat," says Jeff Roehm, an ATF official who at the time ran the bureau's Boston field office.
The bulk of the project was devoted to interrupting a street dynamic in which a relatively small core of young, violent gang members had produced a climate of fear that drove gun acquisition. A team of police officers, prosecutors, federal agents and others began meeting with gang members, putting them on notice that henceforth violence by any single member would bring down a concentrated local, state and federal assault on the entire gang. That month, Boston's youth homicide rate began to plummet. The average monthly rate from May through November 1996 was 70% lower than the monthly average before the project began. From June 1996 through June last year, the city had seven months when not a single youth homicide occurred.
But the Boston Gun Project had a more far-reaching effect.
In 1995, as the research phase of the project was just starting, ATF was in the early stages of a post-Waco reorganization under a new director, John Magaw, who set trafficking as the bureau's primary strategic target. At about this time, Harvard's Kennedy and a Treasury Department official, Susan Ginsburg, began an extended conversation that prompted Ginsburg to lobby within Treasury, ATF's parent, for a national program of comprehensive gun tracing. She and ATF's tracing advocates envisioned tracing every single gun recovered by police in America's largest cities--a vision that resulted in Clinton's July 1996 launch of the Youth Crime Gun Interdiction Initiative--Yogi--which initially set out to trace every gun recovered in 17 major cities including Atlanta, St. Louis and New York.