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Please help us expand our community — consider forwarding this email to a friend. For original reporting from The Trace, visit thetrace.org.
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OCTOBER 17, 2017
Good morning, Bulletin readers. The Brady Campaign is suing the ATF after the Bureau went silent on how an executive developed a memo outlining a more gun-friendly bureau. Jerry Brown vetoes a bill to make California gun stores more secure against burglary. And a serial killer prohibited from buying guns got help amassing an arsenal from a straw purchaser. Those stories and more, below. —Alex Yablon, reporter
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1. ATF fights release of records pertaining to a pro-gun white paper
The ATF’s second-in-command raised eyebrows in the early hours of the Trump administration with a leaked white paper that read to critics like a blueprint for transforming the agency into a much more firearms friendly organization. Now a group of activists are taking the ATF to court to force it to disclose how the memo was put together.
The Brady Center sued the ATF in a D.C. district court Monday, alleging the Bureau has not complied with a Freedom of Information Act request filed in March.
In a press release, the Brady Center noted that ATF Associate Deputy Director Ron Turk’s memo recommended a number of rollbacks that have been on the NRA’s wish list for years, including deregulating silencers and eliminating reporting of bulk semi automatic rifle sales in states along the Mexican border. According to Brady Center attorneys, ATF never responded to the FOIA request.
Brady says it’s also waiting on a response to a second records request filed in August, which seeks records of how frequently the ATF inspects gun dealers accused of chronic infractions. The ATF typically only inspects six to seven percent of dealers in a given year.
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2. Jerry Brown signs three gun control bills, vetoes a fourth
The liberal governor of California signed three bills over the weekend aimed at further reducing carrying of weapons and examining access to weapons by people at risk of harming themselves or others. But he also vetoed a fourth bill written to slow a gun store burglary wave from which California has not been immune.
The one gun bill vetoed by Brown would have stiffened the state’s security requirements for gun stores, which already exceed those found in most of the rest of the country. In a message that accompanied the veto, Brown expressed doubt toward the need for stricter security mandates.
According to the ATF, 30 stores in California reported a burglary in 2016, up from 14 the year before and just 11 in 2012, the earliest year for which data is available.
The gun bills Brown did sign Saturday would:
- Eliminate open carry on unincorporated land. California already has some of the strictest rules in the country against open carry.
- Reverse attempts by local school administrators to allow employees to carry on the job. Some rural districts had allowed teachers with concealed carry licenses to work in the classroom while armed. Read our post on that change here.
- Provide public health researchers with access to data from the state’s gun violence restraining order program. The three-year-old policy allows family members and police to petition courts to temporarily seize weapons from someone at risk of hurting himself or others. “If there’s a high risk situation, taking firearms out of the equation can change the outcome,” well-known UC Davis medical school professor Garen Wintemute told me. He'll be among the scientists studying how much that promise holds true.
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3. South Carolina serial killer acquired five gun silencers via straw purchaser
A grim criminal saga in South Carolina took on a new wrinkle last week when prosecutors indicted a man for buying 12 firearms and five silencers for Todd Kohlhepp, who confessed last year to murdering seven people.
Kohlhepp, who is now serving consecutive life sentences, would not have been able to buy the firearms or suppressors from a gun store himself. He was disqualified from gun ownership by a serious criminal record stretching back decades, and had served 14 years in prison for kidnapping a teenage girl in 1986.
With Dustan Lawson allegedly acting as his straw purchaser, Kohlhepp amassed an arsenal anyway. When police raided the killer’s property in June of last year, they found his weapons cache, along with a woman who’d been held captive in a shipping container for two months.
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4. Arkansas releases new details on its plans to license gun carriers on campus
The state police released a draft of new regulations for an “enhanced” concealed weapons license that would allow residents to bring a gun onto the property of public universities and colleges, as well as bars and other areas typically off limits to gun carriers.
The proposed license standards would require applicants to take classes on how to handle an active shooter scenario and what to do when encountering law enforcement. Those who wish to go armed in all areas of campus will get three chances to pass a live-fire test to prove their marksmanship.
At least 26 states will issue concealed carry licenses with no proof the applicant has ever fired a gun. Arkansas’ new requirements for campus carriers could amount to eight hours of instruction, longer than the five hours the state demands of typical concealed weapons license holders, and more than twice as much training as the three hours of instruction Utah requires for its popular, widely recognized out of state license.
Arkansas' campus carry law carry law took effect on September 1 but has been in limbo while the state police worked on the new training program for enhanced licensees. The draft standards will next go through a public comment period.
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5. Florida fails to report mental health records to its state gun background check system
An investigation by the South Florida Sun Sentinel found that the state’s government and medical authorities routinely fail to enter mental health records into the FBI’s background check system. Though the state expanded the range of records hospitals and doctors should report back in 2013, many of Florida’s most populous counties have only submitted a relative handful of names since then.
The Sun Sentinel found that only one county, Hillsborough, had submitted a significant number of records, with 3,500 residents of that part of the state entered into the background check system. The state’s two most populous counties, Miami-Dade and Broward, had only reported 273 and 640 names, respectively.
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6. Despite the toll gun violence takes on black lives, research on homicide receives sparse funding
That’s the conclusion of an analysis published last week, titled “Do black lives matter in public health research and training?”
Authors Molly Rosenberg, Angela M. Bengtson, Shabbar I. Ranapurwala, and Ashley Townes compared different causes of death, measured by potential years of life lost to particular populations, with amount of federal research funding and amount of research published. They found that homicide, overwhelmingly committed with firearms, was the single largest contributor to potential years of life lost among African Americans, accounting for ten percent of all life lost.
Yet few federal grants or publications were devoted to the issue. They identified only 57 federally funded papers on homicide, compared to 117 on tuberculosis.
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