August 29, 2010
By Meredith Mandell and Elizabeth Llorente

It’s called the Iron Pipeline.

A Glock 9mm handgun confiscated in a 2009 shooting in Paterson is the type of weapon authorities say flows into New Jersey illegally, a trade that is difficult to stop because of lax controls in other states.

Interstate 95 and its connector highways earned that nickname as the favored route of gun smugglers who bring inexpensively purchased firearms from East Coast states with lax gun-control laws into strict states like New Jersey.

That reality is just one of the obstacles authorities face in trying to keep illegal guns off the streets of Paterson and other New Jersey communities.

In 2009, illegal firearms killed 13 people in Paterson and injured 54. Most of the shootings involved gang members or drug dealers fighting over turf, but on at least two occasions, a young person was accidentally shot dead with an illegally obtained gun. At one point last year, residents crowded into the City Council chambers to plead passionately with elected officials to stop the gun violence.

But that effort is hampered by the jumble of contradictory laws that exist from state to state, as well as loopholes in the laws of even strict gun-control states. In addition, recent federal regulations restrict the flow of public information about the provenance, or history, of guns used in crimes.

"We may have some of the toughest gun laws in the country, but if surrounding states don’t, it weakens our efforts," said former Paterson Mayor Joey Torres.

To be sure, even if guns were absent, there would still be violence in places where poverty, drugs and gangs breed desperation. But the availability of guns ensures that the mayhem will often be lethal.

"Without attacking the supply side, you’re not attacking the problem in its totality," said Scott Sweetow, assistant special agent of the Atlanta office of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF). "Traffickers are fulfilling a demand. Certainly they’re in it to make some money."

‘Straw’ purchases

Law enforcement agencies were able to identify the sources of a little more than half of the 4,500 crime guns recovered in New Jersey during 2009, according to data kept by the ATF. About 1,200 weapons were bought in Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia and Florida; 602 were legally purchased in New Jersey and the remainder were traced to elsewhere in the U.S., as well as Puerto Rico and Guam.

New Jersey’s gun laws are among the toughest in the nation, according to a 2008 report by the group Mayors Against Illegal Guns. New Jersey has enacted laws that require a permit to buy a gun, mandatory reporting of lost or stolen guns, local control of firearms regulations and state inspection of gun dealers. Similar requirements are often absent in other states.

And New Jersey officials have taken their own steps to curtail illegal gun trafficking.

In 2008, the Legislature expanded the Graves Act to make illegal gun possession a second-degree crime and imposed a mandatory minimum three-year prison sentence.

In addition, former Attorney General Anne Milgram also issued a directive ordering all local police departments to trace guns through ATF’s national eTrace information system. Peter Aseltine, a spokesman for the Attorney General’s Office, said that since this initiative began the number of guns recovered in New Jersey rose from 554 in 2008 to more than 4,500 in 2009.

Federal law requires licensed gun retailers to check for a prospective buyer’s criminal or mental-health background before making the sale. Licensed sellers also must keep records of their transactions.

Problems arise, however, in what are called "straw" purchases — where a person with no criminal record buys weapons on behalf of a felon or a trafficker who then sells to someone in a distant location like Paterson who wouldn’t be able to legally buy a gun.

The ATF, along with the National Shooting Sports Foundation, the trade association for the firearms industry, launched a campaign in 2008 to teach gun retailers how to detect a straw purchase.

The campaign, called "Don’t Lie for the Other Guy," seeks to deter straw purchases by publicizing that buying a gun for someone who is prohibited from owning one is a federal crime that carries up to 10 years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000.

The Georgia route

Law enforcement officials in Georgia are making a case for shutting off the Iron Pipeline.

In April, a U.S. District Court jury in Atlanta found two people guilty of lying to a firearms dealer to illegally buy guns. Three of the five guns bought in that case were recovered weeks later in New Jersey, where they were used in crimes, the Justice Department said.

In a statement in response to the verdict, Sally Quillian Yates, the U.S. attorney for the northern district of Georgia, wrote that her state is a source of "far too many illegal guns" and that it is "critically important" to eliminate the sources of guns that are bought for use in crimes.

Problems also arise across the nation in transactions that don’t involve licensed dealers.

It’s illegal for anyone knowingly to sell a firearm to someone who cannot legally buy one. But private sellers — including gun collectors, pawn-shop employees or people selling a family collection — are not bound by rules requiring background checks and keeping records of the guns they sell.

Selling firearms without a license also is illegal, but in many circumstances that can be difficult to prove and punish, criminologists say. The statute does not cover people who make occasional sales or purchases of firearms and characterize the practice as, say, a hobby.

"In the secondary market, nothing is illegal," said David M. Kennedy, a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the director of the Center for Crime Prevention and Control.

The secondary market, he said, "allows people to sell Glocks to bad people, and now you have a felon with a gun." And then "there’s the guy who sells five guns a day to people he knows are gangbangers and drug dealers."

Overarching the battle on illegal guns is the debate over the Second Amendment, which guarantees that "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." Gun-rights proponents say stronger federal laws compromise rights guaranteed by the measure.

Better enforcement

The answer to gun violence is not more hurdles to purchasing guns legally but better enforcement of existing laws, said Andrew Arulanandam, public affairs director for the National Rifle Association.

"We already have all these laws on the books that address illegal gun trafficking, criminal abuse of firearms, and those laws just need to be enforced," he said. "We need to put criminals away and leave law-abiding people alone."

Arulanandam decried the gun-control groups that push for open public access to gun-tracking data, saying they merely "want to use law enforcement information for political, legal and monetary agendas. They want to [use the data] for lawsuits against the firearms industry."

Mildred Carrion — whose son Roberto was shot apparently by accident with an illegal handgun in July of 2009 — believes she has a right as a parent to know how that weapon was available to her son.

"In my situation, it was put in the hands of my kid," she said. "Where did it come from and how did it get there?"

Aman Ullah, a friend of Roberto’s, said the two of them bought the gun from a drug dealer in Paterson. Roberto was shot as he and other friends were horsing around with the gun in an apartment on East 23rd Street in Paterson. Ullah is facing weapons charges. He has pleaded not guilty and his next court date is Sept. 13.

Paterson police initially did not use the ATF’s service to trace the gun; only after a reporter inquired about how the gun got to Paterson did police order the trace.

Police are under no obligation to disclose where a gun originated because often it’s considered part of an ongoing investigation, said Paterson police Detective Lt. Richard Reyes. Police also would not comment about why the trace was not ordered immediately.

Since 2003, federal law has prohibited the ATF from releasing information from the firearms trace database to anyone other than a law enforcement agency or prosecutor in connection with a criminal investigation.

The law also requires that the FBI destroy certain background-check records within 24 hours and removes an obligation from gun dealers to regularly review their inventories.

Groups such as the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence and Mayors Against Illegal Guns successfully lobbied to roll back some of the provisions this year, but information about traces or which dealers are linked to the highest number of crime guns "continues to be classified and not available to the public," said Peter Hamm, a Brady Center spokesman.

"The only folks who benefit from keeping this information a secret [are] the people who are in the business of selling guns," Hamm said.