by The Last Gun- How Changes in the Gun Industry Are Killing Americans
This desert of information is no accident. By choking off detailed data about the effects of its products, the gun industry can promote its fantasy world of good gun owners and bad criminals, a world in which the social utility of guns outweighs the harm they do.
Take Glock, for but one example among many. According to Paul Barrett, “Glock . . . is not a particular villain within the fraternity of firearms.”12 Perhaps, perhaps not. Given the information lockdown, it is impossible to quantify the comparative villainy of Glock handguns and any other make. The comparison would, in any case, miss the point. Whether Glock or Taurus or Ruger or Smith & Wesson is the most evil is irrelevant. The point is that their products do tremendous, unnecessary harm to tens of thousands of innocent Americans every year.
Figure 10 illustrates the use of Glock guns in mass shootings in the United States. But what about Glock’s role in the everyday carnage documented throughout this book? How often are Glocks—or any other manufacturer’s guns—used in the crimes, murders, domestic suicides, shooting rampages, rage shootings, and other instances of violence that take so many lives and inflict so many injuries in the United States every year? These are questions the answers to which the gun industry very much does not want you to know.
One might think that ATF would be the logical place to go for an answer about the use of guns in crime (putting aside the typical delay of a year or two from collection to release of government data on any subject). After all, one of ATF’s principal law enforcement support functions is tracing the origin of guns recovered at crime scenes and matching guns with the ballistic traces left on fired bullets and casings. The ATF says its National Tracing Center (NTC) is the nation’s only crime-gun tracing facility. “As such, the NTC provides critical information that helps domestic and international law enforcement agencies solve firearms crimes, detect firearms trafficking and identify trends with respect to intrastate, interstate and international movement of crime guns.”13 Here is how ATF recently described the process:
Firearms tracing is the systematic tracking of the movement of a firearm from its first sale by a manufacturer or importer through the distribution chain in an attempt to identify the first retail purchaser in order to provide investigative leads for criminal investigations. After the firearm is recovered and the identifiers are forwarded to the NTC, ATF contacts the manufacturer or importer to ascertain the sale or transfer of the firearm. ATF will attempt to contact all ensuing Federal firearms licensees (wholesale/ retail) in the distribution chain until a purchaser is identified or the trace process cannot continue due to a lack of accurate or incomplete information on the trace request or in the Federal firearms licensee’s records.14
There is no question that ATF has an enormous database documenting in detail—by make, model, caliber, origin, etc.—these “crime guns.” The NTC traced over 295,000 guns in calendar year 2007; in 2008, over 288,000 guns; in 2009, over 354,000 guns; in 2010, over 285,000 guns; and in 2011, over 319,000 guns.15 That’s a million and a half crime-gun traces in just five years.
One might think that the massive cost of gun crimes would inspire the release of this entire valuable database, rather than the sparse summary data ATF releases from time to time. According to a 2012 report by the Police Executive Research Forum, a nonprofit police research organization,16 in 2010 alone the cost of gun crime in America—gun murder, armed robbery, and aggravated assault—was almost $58 billion: $57,926,815,000 to be exact (using the most conservative of the three most recent studies of such costs).17
One would, however, be mistaken in that thought.
There is no chance under present law—known as the Tiahrt Amendment—and federal government policy that the ATF data will be released in any form that is of serious use to the general public, public policy analysts, or much of anybody else, for that matter. Combined with a federal law barring most civil lawsuits against the gun industry, the dearth of information is an essential part of the industry’s strategy to insulate itself from liability for the consequences of its products, a civil liability that almost every other consumer product in America bears.
In addition to protecting itself from lawsuits, the gun industry and its advocates are also aware that when the broader public debate about guns and gun violence is fact based, they lose. When Americans get a glimpse of the truth, they are appalled. For example, the VPC’s continuing research on fatal, nondefensive shootings involving private persons legally allowed to carry concealed handguns in public revealed in May 2012 that within a single state, Michigan, over a single year (July 1, 2010, to June 30, 2011), permit holders took thirty-eight lives, by either killing others or committing suicide.18 “Michigan is one of the few states that releases any data about non-self-defense deaths associated with concealed handgun permit holders,” VPC’s legislative director Kristen Rand noted in releasing the data. “If we could obtain similar data for every state that issues concealed handgun permits, the numbers would be staggering. The public deserves to know the truth.”19
Congress has even required ATF to state—in the few reports that it does release from its gun-trace data—that the traces are not a “random sample” and “are not chosen for purposes of determining which types, makes or models of firearms are used for illicit purposes.”20 What Congress does not acknowledge and does not require ATF to state is that there is no other source of data, random or not, that comes near to matching the value of the millions of crime-gun histories in the ATF trace data. Only ATF has such extensive records of traces of guns associated with crimes in the United States. And in any case, ATF does not “choose” the guns it traces—the trace requests come to ATF from law enforcement agencies.
As one commentator has noted, “a flawed representation is better than no representation at all.”21 If Congress truly wanted better sources of analytical data than ATF crime-gun trace data, it would take a different tack. It would mandate the creation and funding of a comprehensive data gathering and analysis system that would provide a complete, detailed, and freely accessible national picture of guns and gun violence, integrating law enforcement and public health data sources. Such a fact-based resource—with great granularity at national and local levels of experience—would provide such information as: the number and rate of murder-suicides, the characteristics of the perpetrators and their victims, and the kinds (type, model, caliber, and manufacturer) of guns they use; the number and kind of gun crimes committed by concealed-carry-permit holders and other private persons legally allowed to carry concealed guns, as well as the kind of guns they used; the number and types of gun crimes by type, model, caliber, and manufacturer (and importer, in the case of imported guns); the use of high-capacity magazines in gun crimes; and the means by which persons using guns in crime obtained their guns.
The collection and analysis of data about the public health factors in gun death and injury have also been suppressed by the gun industry and the NRA. For ten years—from 1986 to 1996—the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) sponsored groundbreaking peer-reviewed studies of the public health effects of guns in the United States.22 The agency’s gun violence research agenda was a relatively small part of its overall program of research into the causes of deaths and injuries and ways to reduce them. The NRA, however, launched an aggressive program—aided by a small group of conservative doctors—to shut down the CDC’s research effort.23 The NRA’s objective was initially to eliminate entirely the CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, thus intending to sacrifice all injury prevention research on the altar of “gun rights.” When they were unable to wipe out the agency, the gun lobby enlisted a Republican U.S. representative from Arkansas, Jay Dickey, to help it push through Congress an amendment that cut $2.6 million from the injury prevention center’s budget. That was roughly the same amount that had been spent the year before on its gun research programs.24 “It’s really simple with me,” Dickey told the New York Times in 2011. “We have the right to bear arms because of the threat
of government taking over the freedoms that we have.” The NRA’s success not only cut off funding. It cast a deep chill over the CDC’s willingness to sponsor research into the causes of gun violence and the best ways to prevent it. “We’ve been stopped from answering the basic questions,” Mark Rosenberg, the former director of the injury prevention center, told the Times for the same 2011 article.25
But following the 2012 Aurora massacre, former representative Dickey and Rosenberg joined forces to argue in favor of resuming the kind of government research that Dickey had helped cut off. “Now a body of knowledge makes it clear that an event such as the mass shooting in Aurora, Colo., was not a ‘senseless’ occurrence as random as a hurricane or earthquake but, rather, has underlying causes that can be understood and used to prevent similar mass shootings,” the two wrote in an opinion piece published by the Washington Post. “Firearm injuries will continue to claim far too many lives at home, at school, at work and at the movies until we start asking and answering the hard questions,” they observed.26
Media reports provide a glimpse of the gun violence that Congress has chosen to hide from the American people. Appendix B, for example, is a compilation of incidents involving Glock handguns that were reported in the media between May 1, 2011, and April 30, 2012, extracted from searches of the Nexis.com commercial database. Glock seemed a fair choice for this snapshot, given its iconic nature. “It’s not the romantic idea of a gun,” according to Paul Barrett, the Glock chronicler. “It’s the essence of a gun.”27
As shown in chapter 1, the news media underreport gun incidents in general. In addition, media reports of gun incidents often do not specify the make or model of the gun used. For these reasons, this compilation without a doubt understates reality. Nevertheless, appendix B illustrates the magnitude of the harm that Glock’s handguns routinely inflict on ordinary Americans. The reported incidents include the familiar categories of gun violence: murder-suicides, rage killings, criminal trafficking, children killing themselves or killing other children, unintentional mayhem, and so on. A few incidents deserve a closer look because they illustrate how ATF collects gun crime data and how much that data could contribute to an informed public.
One of the more tragic of these examples is the horrific murder of Skyla Whitaker, eleven, and Taylor Paschal-Placker, thirteen, on Sunday afternoon, June 8, 2008, near the small town of Weleetka, Oklahoma.
Skyla and Taylor were inseparable friends. Taylor was “a big-hearted girl who rescued turtles crawling in the middle of the road and wanted to become a forensic scientist.” Skyla was “the carefree adventurer—the girl who walked barefoot almost everywhere and rode her bicycle down dirt roads.” Taylor was the only girl in the sixth grade class, Skyla the only girl in the fifth.28
The girls often spent weekends at each other’s homes.29 That Sunday at about five P.M., Skyla and Taylor went for a walk—as they often did—down a deserted dirt road toward the Bad Creek bridge. The bridge is “a popular place for teens to gather and shoot guns.”30 A few minutes later, Taylor’s grandfather called her to tell the girls to come home. When she did not answer her cell phone, he went looking for the two. He found both girls lying side by side in a ditch, shot dead.31 An autopsy found that Skyla was shot eight times and Taylor five. Both were shot in the legs, torso, neck, and base of the skull. Both were shot with guns of two different calibers. Both were apparently facing the shooter.32
There was little for investigators to go on. Authorities suspected that the shooter was probably a local, given the remote rural location, even though residents were horrified by the thought. “Everybody wants it to be a monster because they don’t want to believe it could happen in their town,” an Oklahoma City detective said of such cases. “But monsters come in all shapes and sizes. It’s not like a Disney movie where you can see the villain right away”33 Investigators doubted that a stranger would wander into the remote area.34
They also considered the possibility that, given the two types of guns used, there had been two shooters.35 One of the guns the girls had been shot with was a 22 caliber, and some of these comparatively small bullets, less than a quarter of an inch in diameter, were recovered in the autopsy. But what would turn out to be most important clue were five shell casings found at the scene, fired from another gun. The shells were in 40 Smith & Wesson caliber. They were manufactured by Winchester. The casings were sent for analysis to the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation (OSBI) Forensic Science Center in Edmond, Oklahoma.36
Microscopic but highly individual tool marks are left on the working parts of guns during their manufacture, “analogous to the fingerprints of the firearm.”37 By comparing under magnification the microscopic marks on the shell casings found on the crime scene, an OSBI firearms criminalist was able to determine that they had all been fired from the same gun, and that it had been a Glock 40 caliber pistol.38
The 40 caliber round was developed by Smith & Wesson and Winchester and introduced at NSSF’s 1990 SHOT Show. The plan was that Smith & Wesson would make the guns and Winchester would manufacture the ammunition in the new caliber. The .40 Smith & Wesson round was the “perfect compromise,” according to the gun writer and entrepreneur Massad Ayoob, between those who wanted more rounds in their pistols’ ammunition magazines and those who wanted bigger bullets. The existing “wondernine” 9mm pistol typically held about sixteen rounds. Although the .45 ACP bullet was much bigger and thus capable of inflicting more damage, its size demanded bigger magazines and thus bigger grips for pistols chambered in it. The 40 caliber was developed as a compromise. Glock quickly followed Smith & Wesson into the market with a pistol chambered in the new round.39
Heavily marketed to law enforcement by Glock, the new round became widely favored for its “stopping power” among law enforcement agencies and civilians.40 A trainer at the Georgia Peace Officers Standards and Training Center told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 2004 that the “heavier bullet” used in the 40 caliber “tends to penetrate deeper . . . into the body to impact the organs deep in the body. This whole thing is about terminal ballistics.”41
Agents took pictures of people as they left the girls’ funeral and confiscated the funeral service registry.42 Investigators also released a drawing of a “person of interest” in the case.43 But the investigation stalled. The OSBI originally assigned about a dozen agents to the case. Three months later, that number had dropped to four as leads dwindled.44 OSBI case agent Kurt Titsworth continued to follow up clues as they came in. In January 2010, for example, he learned that a man named Kevin Joe Sweat had bought a 40 caliber Glock in the fall of 2007. Titsworth interviewed Sweat, who said that he had sold the gun in 2007 and did not know the serial number.45 Authorities later said that there was no reason at that time to connect Sweat to the murders.46 He was just one more of a score of people who owned Glock 40 caliber pistols in and around bucolic Okfuskee County.
That is where matters remained until August 15, 2011, more than three years after the Weleetka shootings, when Kevin Joe Sweat was arrested and charged with the capital murder of Ashley Taylor, his girlfriend. Ashley and Kevin left the town of Okmulgee, near Weleetka, on July 17, supposedly headed for Louisiana to get married. When they did not return, Ashley’s mother reported her missing. Kevin was tracked down and gave several different explanations to Agent Titsworth, who was investigating the woman’s disappearance. Eventually, the investigation led to the property of Kevin Sweat’s father near Weleetka, and the charred remains of a bonfire. In the ashes, investigators found burned clothing, bits of eyeglasses consistent with those of Ashley, and human remains believed to be hers.47
Soon after, agents returned to the elder Sweat’s property and searched an area where, he had told OSBI agents, Kevin sometimes shot his gun. A number of 40 caliber shell casings were found in the dirt. Forensic examination revealed that they had been fired from the same gun as the shells found at the site of the 2008 murder of Skyla and Taylor.48
On September 13, 2011,
Titsworth interviewed Kevin Sweat, who was already in custody on the charge of murdering his girlfriend. Sweat confessed to the murders of Skyla and Taylor, according to the affidavit filed in support of charges against him.
Sweat pulled over on the side of the road and saw “two monsters” come at him. Sweat then “panicked.” Sweat grabbed his Glock .40 caliber handgun from between the seats of his car. Sweat then “shot the monsters” with the Glock handgun. Sweat then grabbed a “22 caliber” gun from the glove box and “shot the monsters” with the .22 caliber gun. Sweat then got into his car and left. Sweat told Titsworth that he shot the “monsters” with the Glock .40 caliber handgun that he had purchased in 2007 while living in Henryetta, OK.49
A question of proof still remained. Agents had evidence connecting the shell casings on the crime scene to the casings on the elder Sweat’s property. Were those casings fired from the very Glock 40 caliber pistol that Kevin Sweat had admitted buying and claimed that he had sold? If investigators had the gun, they could cycle a round through the chamber and compare the marks on the shell casing to the ones they already had. By then, OSBI had obtained the serial number of the gun from the dealer who sold it to Sweat—EKG463US.50
But they could not find the gun itself. OSBI asked the FBI to run a crime-gun trace request through ATF, using the gun’s serial number. That trace turned up an interesting history, and a one-in-a-million piece of physical evidence that sealed the case tight.
The FBI reported that the ATF trace revealed that the Glock pistol had originally been sold to the Baltimore Police Department sometime around 2005. The Baltimore police sent the gun back to Glock shortly thereafter, one of a batch of defective pistols. Glock refurbished the guns, and one from Baltimore ended up in the Oklahoma gun store where Kevin Joe Sweat bought it in the fall of 2007. But there was more. It turned out that the Baltimore police test-fire all guns before they are distributed to officers and keep the sample casings on file.51 The police department had a shell casing from the 40 caliber Glock with serial number EKG463US. On October 5, 2011, an OSBI agent picked up the shell casing from the Baltimore Police Department. The next day, an OSBI technician matched the casing to the shells recovered at the crime scene and on the Sweat property near Weleetka.52