Tracking Florida’s AR-15s is illegal
Florida tracks how much cold medicine Floridians buy and whether they hunt or fish.
The state maintains a registry of medical marijuana users and people who own venomous reptiles.
Palm Beach County even keeps a list of licenses for adult entertainers.
What we don’t know: Who owns an AR-15 rifle.
Florida law bans state and local officials from compiling a list of people who own guns — including the AR-15 used in the Feb. 14 attack at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland that killed 17 people-and wounded 16.
The law states, “A list,
record, or registry of legally owned firearms or law-abiding firearm owners is not a law enforcement tool.” Creating one is a felony under Florida law, and governmental agencies can be fined up to $5 million for violating that statute.
Federal law also prohibits the creation of a nationwide, searchable database of gun owners.
The National Rifle Association has long fought efforts to track gun ownership. The organization maintains that gun owners have a Second Amendment right to bear arms and shouldn’t be required to register with the government to exercise that constitutional right.
“Those who wonder what motivates American gun owners should understand that perhaps only one other word in the English language so boils their blood as ‘registration,’ and that word is ‘confiscation,’ ” the NRA wrote in 2000. “Gun owners fiercely believe those words are ominously related.”
But gun-control advocates argue that a registry would help keep weapons out of the hands of dangerous people and aid in murder and gun trafficking investigations.
“It just makes sense,” said Hannah Shearer, a staff attorney with the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence. “Lots of dangerous items that people own need to be registered with the state in case something bad happens.”
While not calling for a registry or banning assault weapons, Gov. Rick Scott unveiled a host of reforms Friday, including raising the age to purchase a rifle to 21, creating a “violent threat restraining order” that would bar people deemed a threat from buying guns, boosting funding for mental health and banning bump stocks, an attachment that causes a semiautomatic rifle to fire faster.
“I know there are some who advocate for a mass takeaway of Second Amendment rights,” Scott said. “That is not the answer. Keeping guns away from dangerous people and mental illness is what we need to do.”
Tracing a gun
When it comes to tracing a gun, the process resembles something out of the 1950s rather than an episode of “CSI,” said Michael Bouchard, who retired in 2007 from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives as an assistant director of field operations.
When investigators recover a gun and serial number, they must make a series of phone calls to find out whom it was sold to — first to the manufacturer, then to the wholesaler and finally to the licensed dealer. Often, agents must pore through handwritten records kept in gun shops.
“It’s pretty archaic,” said Bouchard, who is president of the ATF Association, a group of retired ATF agents. “They buy the gun and walk away. There is no record of that sale other than the record that stays with the dealer. The dealer is the only person who knows who bought that gun.”
A 1986 federal law prevents the ATF from compiling a searchable database of gun transactions. As a result, detectives can’t key a serial number into a computer to instantly find out who owns a gun as they would for a car.
Instead, the ATF’s National Tracing Center in West Virginia is in charge of tracing guns for more than 6,000 law enforcement agencies. On average, the tracing center processes about 1,000 requests a day, totaling about 370,000 a year.
Gun shops that go out of business pose an even bigger challenge to investigators. Those records are piled in boxes and kept on microfilm at the ATF’s tracing center.
Some water-damaged records are barely legible, Bouchard said.
Databases have been created to aid law enforcement in other areas.
To combat the meth epidemic, states created databases to check whether people were stockpiling cold medicine to make illegal street drugs. A federal law passed after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing requires anyone who buys, sells or transfers more than 25 pounds of ammonium nitrate-based fertilizer to register with the Department of Homeland Security.
A few states have required guns to be registered. Six states and the District of Columbia require at least some weapons to be registered, according to the Giffords Law Center. Those states are California, Connecticut, Hawaii, Maryland, New Jersey and New York.
The Florida Legislature has taken a different approach, finding that a database of gun owners would be “an instrument for profiling, harassing, or abusing lawabiding citizens based on their choice to own a firearm and exercise their Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms as guaranteed under the United States Constitution.” The Legislature expressed concerns that such a list could “fall into the wrong hands and become a shopping list for thieves.”
The state does compile the names of Floridians with concealed-carry permits. Records of guns used in crimes or reported stolen are also exempted.
A South Florida Sun Sentinel investigation in 2006 found that the state’s list of 410,000 concealed-carry permit holders included more than 1,400 people who had pleaded guilty or no contest to felonies, 216 people with outstanding warrants, 128 people with domestic violence injunctions against them and six registered sex offenders.
The Legislature has since closed those records for public review, and they are now confidential under state law.