Shame on them

July 9, 2007

This murderous summer is getting hotter and bloodier.

As of Friday afternoon, Philadelphia police reported 209 homicides in the city this year. Regionally, the dead include a mother of six in Philadelphia, a 12-year-old Camden child, and a 17-year-old killed when he rode a motor scooter through another part of Camden.

The newly traumatized include the 5-year-old daughter of the Philadelphia woman, who watched her mother get fatally shot. Heaven help her cope with what she must be suffering.

It's likely that the firearms used in these killings were illegally obtained by the shooters.

The odds of that being so are heightened because of the lack of political will in Washington and Harrisburg to displease gun-rights absolutists.

Democrats in the U.S. Senate especially should feel ashamed.

The Senate Appropriations Committee, now led by the party thought to be less beholden to the National Rifle Association, had a chance recently to repeal the Tiahrt amendment. That reckless piece of legislation is named after its author, U.S. Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R., Kan.).

The amendment protects rogue gun dealers and thugs who shouldn't possess firearms by cloaking the results of traces done by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives on guns recovered from crime scenes.

Law-enforcement officers can get trace data for specific criminal cases, but not for all. Civilian criminal justice researchers have no direct access to the raw data.

Stifling that information makes it nearly impossible for law enforcement to spot trends showing where crime guns are coming from and who is getting them.

This makes it more difficult to build cases against federally licensed gun dealers who wink at what's known as straw-buyer gun purchases.

In such a transaction, someone who is legally barred from possessing a firearm, such as a felon, recruits someone who has no such prohibition to buy guns for him, for a cut of the action. Those guns then are usually resold illegally on the street. That's how many criminals and children arm themselves.

The Senate committee bowed down to the NRA, not only by leaving the amendment in place, but also by approving a proposal that would make it harder still for mayors and law-enforcement authorities to get all of the trace data they need to protect the public. This shouldn't be allowed to stand in the Senate or House.

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